
Clm PR503 
Boot -^^ 

DOBELL COLLECTION 






FROM CIRCUMSTANCES 

HEREINAFTER ADVERTED TO, 

THE SIXTY COPIES OF THIS ORlfclNAL EDITION 

ARE NOT DISPENSED ON CUSTOMARY 

" CONSIDERATIONS." 



COLLOQUIES, 

DESULTORY AND DIVERSE, 

BUT CHIEFLY UPON 

POETRY AND POETS: 

BETWEEN AN ELDER, ENTHUSIASTIC, 

AND AN APOSTLE OF THE LAW. 



" One caveat, good Reader, and then God speed thee!— Do not open it at 
adventures, and by reading the broken pieces of two or three lines, judge it; 
but read it through, and then I beg pardon if thou disliliest it. Farewell!" 

T. Adams. 



FKOM THE PRESS OF J. LORDAN, ROMSEY. 

1843. 






205449 



PROFESSOR WILSON. 



Bight-admired Sir, 

It might have very well comported with the line 
of argument adopted by a certain Pleader in a case of 
great notoriety^ to make light of the virtue fin sej 
of a Name : — " Whafs in a Name .?" The energetic 
advocate to whom I allude, might have been justified 
in protesting against the undue influence of patro- 
nymics, considering that they were synonymous with 
prejudices which the most impassioned pleading could 
not over-rule, and that their authority, had it been 
decisive, would have insisted on a nonsuit. His 
interrogative, however, is remarkably happy in the 
elasticity of its signification; — / intend it to be read 
with another punctuation — "What's in a Name!" 
and thus employ it to convey an emphatic converse 
Cleaning to that which it expresses in re Romeo 
Montague. 



The pages to which I venture to prefix a Name 
with Poesy " linked like leaves to flowers/' afford 
an habitation for sundry cogitative vagrancies over 
that delectable territory, rich in all floral luxuriance, 
which considerate Muses have fertilized for the health- 
ful holiday of young hearts, and for the reinvigoration 
of the world-wearied — to whom the " constant revo- 
lution" of the same repeated cares, might else 

" make languid life 
A pedlar's pack, bowing the bearer down." 

It would, however, have required a reckless confidence 
in the benignity of Professor Wilson, to proffer 
these stray conceits as an acceptable thank-offering 
for many hours charmed pursuit of his efflorescent 
pen; — crude as they are in conception, and cramped 
in conformation, this presentation of them to a Poetic 
Mind would, if it were written, be indited with a 
trembling pinion. But certain peculiarities in the 
construction of the "habitation," encourage me to 
hope for a lenient scrutiny of its contents. 

Of the little volume before you, one individual 
has been composer, and compositor and imprinter 
throughout: — this circumstance is only noticeable. 



inasmuch as it may be a mental and mechanical com- 
bination unprecedented, but unimposing. Printers 
have been authors of renown ; and Methuselah, with 
a knowledge of the art, adequate materiel, the patience 
of Job, and sufficient perseverance, might, singly, 
have completed a work, voluminous as the bulkiest 
Cyclopsedia of the present day. 

But the pen has been a stranger to the prose part 
of its composition, and the scribe's office subverted: 
— with the exception of acknowledged quotations, I 
have been unaided by a line of manuscript or other 
copy. There is a rhythmical extravaganza in the 
sixth chapter, which I very reluctantly signalize in 
this place, because the skeleton of twenty lines of it, 
or thereabouts, was pen-traced; the composing-stick 
has been otherwise my sole mechanical " help to com- 
position." Memory has supplied me with sentiments 
syllabled aforetime, to the occupation of three or four 
pages; so unpremeditated else were its contents, that 
when, as an employment for leisure, I commenced the 
chapter called Introductory, it heralded I knew not 
what. Evidences of a want of design and forethought 
will, I fear, too frequently recur to substantiate this 
fact, and to prevent an innocent illusion I should wish 



to create, that my " actors" are not " spirits/' but 
independent personages, holding separate opinions, 
and endowed with the gift of tongues. 

In proportion as this explanation may be injurious 
to subsequent vraisemblance, it may propitiate the 
severe. The entire absence of a preconcerted plan 
from the beginning, may " show cause" why no pro- 
fessional uniqueness distinguishes a literary bantling, 
to which, possibly, the annals of printing may not 
" parallel a fellow." But having accustomed myself, 
at distant intervals, to simultaneous composition, I 
had closed the first colloquy before it occurred to me 
that perseverance might accomplish a novelty. It was 
essential to uniformity that I should proceed in the 
plain style of execution in which I had commenced. 

I shall be fortunate. Sir, should its " plainness move 
you more than eloquence." The practical disadvan- 
tages inseparable to the mode piu'sued in its com- 
position, will (I repeat my hope,) modify the strictures 
of the considerate. 



C. L. LOKDAN. 



Ilonisey, March, 1813. 



COLLOQUIES. 



By familiarity with our errors we sometimes lose sight of them.— 
The disadvantage of revising sentences of my own shaping, with an 
eye half- reconciled to the inaccuracies it had permitted to pass at the 
first ' muster,' will, I trust, be admitted as an excuse for a few typo- 
graphical errors, of which (abhorring detail) a general confession is 
here made. — A more-than-peccadiUo in page 136, and an occasionally- 
superfluous B after the exclamation " Ay," demand a special acknow- 
ledgement. 



COLLOQUIES, 

DESULTORY AND DIVERSE, BUT CHIEFLY UPON 
POETRY AND POETS. 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

" There is Poetry that is not written. As I here use it, it is delicate percep- 
tion ; something' which is in the nature, enabling: one man to detect harmony, 
and know forms of beauty better than another. It is like a peculiar gift of 
vision, [may it not create one^ making the world we live in more visible. The 
poet hears music in common sounds, and sees loveliness by the wayside. There 
is not a change in the sky, nor a svveet human voice, which does not bring him. 
pleasure. He sees all the light and hears all the music about him— and this is 
Poetry." 

Many thanks, claarming Mary Russell Mitford ! 
for a short and satisfactory definition of a theme, 
which, when certain of our Poets essay to ekicidate, 
dilates delectably for perusal, but fills with despair 
the seeker after a summary signification. Look, for 
instance, at that masterly and stirring reply to What 
is Poetry? in an Appeal for Poets from the pen of 
Barton; — a glorious whole, which it were gothic to 
garble by quotation. A marvellous creature, by the 
way, that Bernard Barton — worthy of love and honor ! 



» INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

Hath Quakerism foregone its frigidness, or how came 
he in the cold cradle of his caste? and not he alone, 
but others, whom that same " frozen bosom" hath 
strangely quickened with poetic breath, and sent 
forth in poetic guise, lovely as " yellow cowslip and 
pale primrose from flowery lap of May." The Hewitts 
among these, and especially Saint Mary! — where is 
verse more suffused by Innocency than hers, — more 
guileless and gladsome, — more red^olent with the air 
of the Garden anterior to the great Mother's misdeed? 
How easy — were the Law one whit less inexorable — 
how easy to conceive a mental reservation, made in 
Mary's favor, by Eve, before the fall! 

Among the multifarious subjects which, in our days, 
our fathers', and, perhaps, in annals yet more remote, 
have attracted, instructed, or diverted the public 
mind, what singular or individual subject has retained 
a potency so perennial as that of Poetry ? Chrono- 
logers who descend to the minutiae of modern times, 
will, in all conscience, have need of flexible pens to 
pourtray faithfully the fluctuations of feeling and of 
general opinion which have characterised the age; 
— its web has indeed been of " a mingled yarn, good 
and ill together;" — and whether, in the judgment of 
posterity, glory or shame shall be deemed to pre- 
dominate in their review of the past proximate, the 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 6 

historian, if metrically inclined, may thus impartially 

usher in his lucubrations : — 

" Admire, exult, despise, laugh, M^eep, and mourn, — 
For here there is much matter for all feeling." 

But, (let us hope that the symptom be not necessarily 
vicious !) the mind, created ' upright,' has of late ap- 
proved itself so fecund with ' inventions,'* — has so 
diversely disported with fantasy, fanaticism, and folly, 
— that few of the swarming " topics of the day" can 
be dignified by the record or esjDected at the hands 
of the chronologer. The age has developed hneaments 
which, however, are British, or, in other words, are 
bold, vigorous, and philanthropic, and these will find 
an " habitation and a name" in the imperishable page ; 
— as to the host of bubbles, over whose birth trum- 
pets were blown, sometimes by fools, at others, by 
knaves — the?/ have evaporated, as was inevitable, 
before the breath of 

" Time's old daughter, Truth." 

These, if they deserve the mention of their paternity, 
were chiefly the ofispring of Politics in a phrenzy ; 
but the "fitful fever" of the parent has subsided, 
and its morbid progeny sleep well. The mild genius 
of Poetry will probably experience, in times future 

* " God made man upright, but they have sought out many in- 
ventions." — Ecdcsiastes, 



4 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

as it has experienced recently, tlie strongest check to 
its diffusiveness and, consequently, to its dominion, in 
the jealousy and turbulence of that spirit, — just now 
subdued, but " scotched, not killed," — which smoul- 
ders in the body politic: — a restless spirit whose 
element is contention, troubled in its very repose, and 
swiftly, with a fancied right or fancied wrong, making 

" all Europe ring, from side to side." 



Here, however, in saucy, sea-girt Albion, we have 
said ejOfectually ^pro tern. J to the furious flow of Fac- 
tion, Here shall thy waves be stayed ! Britain now 
is growing less Babel-like, and, politically speaking, 
we English people are becoming more " of one lan- 
guage and of one speech." For, notwithstanding 
that (in perilous identification of the vox popidi with 
the vox Dei,) the old and solid carved work of our 
good ship, " The State," has been a wee bit notched 
and splintered in the petty lunacies of certain, who, 
drest in authority by the grace of our sovereign Lady, 
Victoria, (God bless her !) and by the sufferance of her 
lieges, did most recklessly " Avield their little tridents" 
• — notwithstanding the mock-heroic havoc of the past, 
our anxieties sleep ; for the bark now floats on smoother 
waters, and we have sure confidence in our Pilot. 
His predecessors persevered in a sinuous policy, which 
bare and rotten," as became it. 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. O 

they modestly preferred to name " liberal and enligh- 
tened!" Let the misnomer pass for the present. In 
their diurnal routine of official navigation, the work 
of pumping and scuttling went on in jocund alter- 
nation, enhvened now and then with a dash into the 
breakers; but the helm is at length wrested from 
tenacious hands ; and steered by the " powers which 
be," the vessel is in no fear of stranding, although 
the manly* Mariner — who believes her buoyancy to 
be a quality infinite — may find the subsidized sea 
surgy in places, and tempestuous. 

" In your modern books for the most part," said 
Coleridge, " the sentences in a page have much the 
same connection with each other that marbles have in 
a bag — they touch without adhering;" — in the actual 
perpetration of irrelevancy, how just appears the ob- 
servation! yet, gentle Eeader, admire the candour 
which forewarned thee from the outset, that in these 
pages many a swerving from strict connectedness may 
be expected; and therefore pray we that Nature, 
in thy allotment of attributes, may have endowed thee 
with a less austere and rigid sense of " oneness" than 
that of Mr. Curdle — dogmatic in dramatic criticism; 
for be again assured, our progress vidll manifest a 
daring disregard to " unities." 

* For the propriety of this appellative, vide the Premier's speeches 
in jiropouiiding- and defending the Income-tax Act. 



b INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

But on a scribe who cannot " wander at his own 
sweet will " without having to travel back again, his 
errings avenge themselves ; and the spirit of digression 
is certainly of that rebellious class which " no exorcism 
can bind." Revenons ! Before the word politics es- 
caped usj we were adverting to the pinnacle which 
Poetry has serenely maintained in a discordant and 
distracted generation; shedding, from the lofty sum- 
mit on which her seat is fixed, an influence benign, 
pacific, and ennobling, through all the acrimony of 
political and literary contest, — the birth, rise, and fall 
of hydra-headed faction, — and the active dissemination 
of doctrines, pestilent though ephemeral, and demo- 
ralising although delusive. 

Not to detain thee, dear Beader, longer on a 
dubious threshold, I will hint at what may be anti- 
cipated in the following papers. In the early spring 
of the year of grace, forty-one, it was my lot literally 
to stumble on an individual, in whose companionship, 
originating in this contingency. Time seemed to aug- 
ment the velocity of his flight. Age, as I afterwards 
discovered, had dealt leniently with him ; for, though 
in much closer proximity to the grand climacteric than 
any spinster-lady in the three kingdoms (as was satis- 
factorily attested by the last census-returns), his visage 
was little marred by furrows, and hoary hairs have won 
reverence for many a younger brow. He had been 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. i 

an enthusiast in poetic admiration, nay more, a poet, 
according to the tenets of Miss Mitford, — one of the 
" many that are sown by Nature ;" and this enthusiastic 
temperament was still the idiosyncrasy of the man. 
It had been, and was, the character of his life. Exter- 
nally, with one exception, his aspect was so unmarked 
by peculiarity, that in the thronged streets of a city 
the majority would have honored him far less than 
Wordsworth's "Wanderer, and have passed him with- 
out remark. But those who, by accident or audacity, 
had looked in for a few consecutive moments at the 
window of liis soul, forgot rudeness in yielding to 
fascination ; for it was a bright and vivid, but inces- 
santly-varying light which flashed firom it. Yet did 
its unrest reveal nought of repulsive passion — no sign 
of strife, or guilt, or fear ; it interpreted alone a swift 
transition of emotions, which, as though reflected 
from a glass, disproved all affinity with the sordidness 
which degrades or the vices which pollute the crowd. 
He was of average stature, and his nether propor- 
tions were arrayed in that old-gentlemanly garb, by 
ancient scriptural translators miputed (in name at 
least) to primitive times, and to the invention of one 
of our first parents — the paternal ancestor, no doubt. 
A supplement in the shape of gaiters, of the same 
dark hue with its antecedent, completed the covering 
of locomotives of no ungraceful structure, and ex- 



8 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

tended over the major part of shoes, well-shaped, 
and as accurately fitted as was compatible with lux- 
urious yet not lavish looseness. His upper garment, 
least of all, betrayed subserviency to the Parisian idol ; 
and the placid artist whom he delighted to honor, 
establishing each primal pattern as a precedent abso- 
lute, and " nursed at happy distance" from, or paying 
platonic indiiference to, conflicting Reports of Fashion, 
never tortured his patron's body or kindled ire in his 
flashing eye, by chasing a fugitive comme it faut for 
the more becoming decoration of his person. That 
unreasonable and (were it not for custom) unseemly 
item, which, without the recommendation of comfort 
or elegance, humanity has so long chosen, under one 
contour or another, for the conservation of the cranium 
from ungenial elements or casual assaults — that formal 
and vacant product of a block, which men call hat, 
as it appeared on the personage of whom I write, was 
in keeping with the ensemble. That part of it for 
which, if seeking a general illustration, we should 
seize instanter upon the half-gallon measure at a 
potato-shop, was rather low than lofty, and would have 
made a lucrative guage for the merchant, if employed 
in such a dispensation of his wares. Its margin, Hke 
that of the elite of modern publications, was capacious, 
and, slightly aiding gravity, served also to render 
less evident to first-sight the swift vicissitudes of 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. » 

visionary expression, to which I have adverted; but, 
in further reference to this " peculiar eye," its keenness 
of perception was, I would aver with humility, a match 
for the Wanderer's in the Excursion. In youth it 
had been subject to short-sightedness; and now, from 
causes clear, I believe, to oculists, Time, so far from 
clouding, clarified its powers. Indeed, the vigour 
of this faculty in one so old, was almost incredible ; 
nor was it until after long intercourse that I, who met 
him oft, was made to comprehend the full reach of 
that tremendous organ, and then by an acquisition 
of intelligence more sudden and startling than the 
stoppage of a bank to an American. My friend — for 
in sooth he and I were soon 

" A pair of Friends, though I was young. 
And he was sixty-two" — 

my friend (I mention it to thee in a whisper, fair 
Eeader,) existed in a state of celibacy, sometimes 
miscalled single blessedness ; [a man who knew what 
happiness meant so well as he, lived not designedly 
so, you may be sure — but of the causes, peradventure, 
anon :] and there came occasionally to brighten the 
old Sponsor's abode by her presence, and make it 
more melodious with the sweet outpourings of her 
solicitude than it was wont to be with poets' voices, 
a Visitant, lovely enough to be ideal, but happily of 



10 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

more perdurable material than " dreams are made of." 
With this fair form, when acquaintanceship had duly 
ripened into familiarity, I commenced a kind of tele- 
graphic correspondence — the signals consisting of 
amatory glances and sighs ; and confiding too implicitly 
in the denseness of that curtain which Old Age 
lowers, with hasty or gentle hand, on eye and ear, we 
saw in the Ancient's presence no absolute impedi- 
ment to all communication. — So we continued to 
exchange dispatches, till the conspiracy demanded 
a denouement, and we resolved — she, of course, re- 
luctantly — that " the catastrophe should be a nuptial." 
That only which allied perplexity with passion was 
the unquestioned fact, that Mary's godfather was as 
profoundly in the dark about her leaning " to the 
soft side of the heart," as was wont to "be a merry 
ex-chief-minister, touching the movements and pro- 
jects of his right trusty and well-beloved co-mates in 
the executive. 

The happiest day of one's life is not invariably ap- 
proached by pleasurable steps. The business of oral 
confession is embarrassing to the most voluble tongue, 
if the tale it tells to the ear mostly concerned be one 
of truth; but the emharras augmenteth mightily if 
another avowal be expedient. However, having to 
leave town for an indefinite space, and reflecting that 
wishes " had not a body in them" to make confession 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 11 

by proxy, I racked up my resolution to the highest 
degree of desperation, and with stanunered accent and 
in paralytic phrase besought to inform him of — that — 
which — " he had read (if outward signs of things 
within could be read) connectedly, from alpha to 
omega, and of which he flattered his discernment he 
could have given me the earliest information !" 

He was a bachelor, but he loved — the poets and 
his godchild in particular, all mankind in general. 
His conversation, when it turned not on practical 
subjects, was poetic in conception, and often poetic in 
expression, and was enriched and stimrdated by an 
exuberancy of quotation. It is some of such that I 
shall endeavour, from crude and hasty notes, to tran- 
scribe. Where there may appear intelligence, the 
praise be his ; where insipidity, the reproach be mine : 
and this must, I fear, frequently occur — for charms 
of voice, impressiveness of gesture, and eloquence of 
eye, are efficient auxiliaries to any theme — too subtle, 
alas ! to be " turned into shape" by any but a " poet's 
pen;" and even by that inspired instrument, are 
seldom in strict fidelity transfixed to the poet's page. 

It only remains, among preliminaries, to relate how 
I became acquainted with the individual I have very 
imperfectly described; and here a fitting occasion 
presents itself (at least, in my opinion, which I sub- 
mit with deference,) for some elucidation of the first 



12 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

person in the singular number in this narration. My 
dramatis personce are limited, and the expediency of 
personal portraiture will, consequently, and perhaps 
fortunately, be unfrequent. Nevertheless, where a 
prolonged intercourse is probable, it is preferable to 
foreknow something of one's camarade; — nay, it is 
desirable, even though he be but the convive of a festal 
hour, or the companion in a stage-coach. — In steam- 
carriages such prescience is a matter of indifference, 
— so is a pleasant prospect and a brawling brook, — 
everything, in short, except the bursting of an engine 
or sepulchral symptoms in a tunnel. 

Be it known then unto thee, friendly Reader, by 
these presents, which come greeting, that the part 
I was to act upon the stage of life (provided I retained 
an essential principle) was appointed for me ere I had 
emerged from swaddling-clothes. At what precise 
period in the present century I made my appearance in 
a part which, like the lion's* (allotted to Snug), is done 
" extempore, for it is nothing but roaring," it is not 
pleasant to communicate. A desire to avoid divulging 
the exact antiquity of the chronicle commenced by 
Time coeval with our birth, is a delicate refinement 
now so generally displayed, that a definite reference 
to the calendar is out of date, and indeed indicates 
eccentricity in a writer. The cause may be question- 
* Midsummer Night's Dream, act iii. scene 1, 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 13 

able — wlietlier this exquisite sensibility be fostered 
by the increase of infant seminaries, sanctioned by an 
enlightened legislature ; or by the diffusion of liberal 
arts and sciences, by still more liberal hawkers pro- 
mulgated on the lowest possible terms on the mer- 
curial side of nothing — the cause, I repeat, may be 
questionable, but the effect is undeniable, that an 
antipathy to reveal with precision the passage of Time 
over our heads, is becoming universal as intelligence. 
It seems to be a resolution of the day, that if the ruth- 
less tyrant will exact his penalties on this corporeal 
compound, it shall be done sub sileiitio/ if we cannot 
efface or conceal, we will not needlessly pubKsh his 
progress on the dial. So that (out of life-insurance 
offices) the utmost admission made consists of a plain- 
tive iteration of the Patriarch's lament — "few and 
evil have the days of the years of my life been." 

I borrow from the Prophet the paternal, maternal, 
and grand-maternal decree concerning myself: here 
it is, briefly — " To the law!" I grew up in the 
dangerous and isolated position of an oidy son — not 
dangerous because isolated, but because idolised. I 
always foresee fearingly the fate of an only son — 
shudderingly, if there be a grandam in existence. A 
unique " pledge," in such a case, is more hapless 
and more to be lamented over than the least-hkely 
to be redeemed at a pawnbroker's. To every volition 



14 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

of his will there is regard — to every appeal, acqui- 
escence j and how can either teeth or temper main- 
taia a purity against indulgences, dispensed with 
freer hand than that of pope of Rome in direst 
poverty? Much less to be expected then, from such 
matriculation, is any premature penchant for those 
interestmg studies and that agreeable discipline ad- 
judged by lord Eldon to be essential to such as hope 
to live by the law. 

My forensic future was proverbial in my boyhood, 
and numberless were the exhortations to learning and 
docility to which it supplied a text. " I heard them, 
but I heeded not." The pedagogue to whose training 
I was entrusted at a later stage, mourned over my 
" mania for wood-walking and vagaries in verse, which 
for the most part were vanity, and would doubtlessly 
end in vexation of spirit ;" but was too tender-hearted 
to chastise, and, like Southey's, " never consumed 
birch enough in his vocation to make a besom." How 
strongly some oddities protest against oblivion ! Poor 
M — ! never shall I forget the " anger, insignificantly 
fierce," which, when it distorted thy patient features, 
was certain to defeat its purpose, provoking to risibi- 
lity, with difiiculty suppressed, the culprit it was in- 
tended to daunt. Nor ever can I fail to remember those 
frequent, quaint, and quiet bubblings from a natural 
fount of humour, whose current the cares of a con- 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 15 

tentious wife and seven clamorous bantlings had not 
sufficed entirely to da7n. 

M — astounded and delighted me a few weeks ago, 
by presenting himself at my chambers. London has 
always a choice collection of comicalities in human 
shape, or claiming a kindred with humanity, but the 
worthy dominie of D — (in the far west) was no mean 
metropolitan marvel during his sojourn in the city, 
" whose streets," quoth he, " are verily interminable, 
presenting a changeless perspective of sooty dwellings, 
dimly visible through an atmosphere of smoke." M — 
was an amateur, of lowly pretensions, on the violin ; and 
in the lull of holiday-freedom he sought in psalmody 
a refuge from connubial reproach, which yielded to 
but one assuaging influence — sleep. M — had a tune 
on the title of which he jested with lugubrious levity ; 
" There is balm (said he) in Gilead." Conscious of 
his enjoyment of sweet sounds, I insisted on his accom- 
panying me to a concert in Hanover-square; and 
during the plaudits which followed a pathetic aria 
from a female singer, he remarked, with a physiogno- 
mical expression in which humour, ecstasy, and gra- 
vity were strangely mingled, " Of a verity, Mr. C, 
yon syren's was the sweetest melody that, in the 
years of my experience, I ever heard produced by a 
Birch '^^ 

* In allusion to the canfatrice of tliat name, who sung. 



16 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

The season of boyhood I think to be as swift of 
wing as those which succeed it; — aye, by the light of 
Memory, whose property it is to condense tribulation 
and to dilate joy, it appears scarcely less swift than that 
Spring of the seasons of the soul — its first love. Before 
I was half prepared to relinquish my capacity as 

" a Dreamer among men, indeed 



An idle Dreamer," 

I was summoned to sterner engagements, in the coil 
of which, narrowing as it did the boundaries of all 
previous pleasures, I syllabled, in con expressione 
monotony, 

" All, happy years! who woukl not be again a boy?" 

Let all on the side male who cannot plead guilt- 
less of this ejaculation, in spirit if not in the very 
letter, come with me hereupon to an arbitrement; 
and as many elegant minds have imbibed many unin- 
telligible fancies from " The Childe," who, were the 
state of childhood agahi their own, would not appear 
as hoys, either by creation or by choice, let us em- 
brace the supplicants of both sexes, and determine 
who are they that — were the change optional — would 
antedate their lives agreeably to their longings. 

Not the youth who is professing love, nor the 
maiden who is pondering upon marriage. 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. IT 

The youth might who has gone before the priest, 
and found himself nearer purgatory than paradise; 
and so might the mother of a thankless child. 

Not the youth who is coming simultaneously to the 
estates of manhood and of money — to the liberty of 
full age and the legacies of fond ancestors. 

The heir might who has gained discretion and lost 
his domain; and so might a young man made old by 
excesses; — so might a saint in an outburst of in- 
nocency, and a sinner in a paroxysm of despair. 

So might he who hath seceded from vice, and is 
troubled at the tears he hath occasioned, or harrowed 
by the heart he may have broken. 

So might he to whom the moral condition of the 
time is " dark as Erebus," who believes that atrocities 
accumulate, and who is discontented at everything. 

But so would not he who knows that progressive 
privileges attend progressive age, and each nobler in 
its order : — that our intellectual advancement, founded 
upon holy Truth, is the supereminent aim, element, 
and safeguard of the soul — our greatness here, and 
qualification for hereafter! 

It is a work of considerable difficulty — which in- 
creases daily — to keep one's footing on the road to 
Honor, beset as it now is beyond all precedent, by a 
host of aspirants beyond all calculation. It is the 



18 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

struggling, hustling, anxious course, on which the 
million compete, and the few unconcernedly regard. 
And of the crowd which enter for the race, how 
few attain the goal — of the countless array of com- 
petitors, how scanty are the gifted with the garland! 
That ramification of the said road which leadeth unto 
legal eminency, is especially notorious for its tortuosity 
and glorious uncertainty; and many a chancellor and 
chief baron in nocturnal visions, which befriend,* 
has found himself bewildered below the bar even, 
and in a like predicament with the disputative an- 
gels, " in wandering mazes lost." With all my 
respect for that learned body to which my sii-e sup- 
plied an insignificant limb in my unworthy person, 
I did not suddenly burn with the ambition to signalise 
myself in the profession : I felt no instantaneous ex- 
hilaration from the study of equity, nor was I roused 
to emulation by the confiict of the courts. A simple 
summary of the subjects it was necessary to know, 
convinced me that Cromwell had singularly fallen 
upon truth when he said, that " there being so many 
law-books of great bulk, so many old musty records, 
reports, and book-cases, as that after the time spent in 
school-learning, the rest of the time of the flower of a 
man's life would be little enousrh to read them over 



" Night visions may befriend, 

Our waking dreams are fatal."— FoMMg'. 



INTEODUCTORY CHAPTER. 19 

and peruse them." Vigilantihus non dormientihus 
suhserviunt leges, should be an aphorism in as constant 
repetition with a student, as his "Ave" with the 
suppliant of a certain creed. No doubt the truism is 
distressing, but it is salutary. If, thought I, I apply 
myself to this " sage and serious doctrine," it must be 
at the sacrifice of pursuits infinitely more pleasurable, 
though certainly less profitable, if estimated by the 
Hudibrastic standard — 

" What is the worth of any thing 
But so much money as 'twill bring?" 

Then, too, I had scruples, suggested by admiration 
of Consistency and reverence of Truth, which, per- 
haps, but for lofty prototypes in punctilio, I might 
have coyly concealed. To " lie like truth," — to 
imitate in one particular a celebrated parliamentary 
refugee, 

" Hazer lo bianco negro, y lo negro bianco," — 

and with the consciousness of crime, to assume and 
argue as for innocence, were hard to be reconciled 
with preconceived notions of the sanctity of Right, 
or conformed to a moral creed in which it was a pri- 
mary article that " The simple energy of Truth needs 
no ambiguous interpetrers." Yet if such reasons 
could prevail upon the noble and sensitive mind of 



20 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

the father of Hale, with so much force as to induce 
him to retire from the practice of his profession, to 
what can we look for a more effective confutation 
of their right to prevail, than to the character of his 
illustrious son? — in the contemplation of which I 
derived a quietus for this order of compunctious 
visitings. 

My countenance was not always " sicklied o'er with 
the pale cast of" parchment which it now wears, and 
on the eve of my entry at Lincoln's-inn, I cogitated 
on a subject of mutual concern with myself and grand- 
mother (not Blackstone). I had still sympathy enough 
with rustic vulgarity to look lovingly on a visage 
whose ruddy tinge betokened a connexion with the 
heart, — a connexion, the existence of which in law- 
yers is sometimes disputed by the profane, on other 
grounds than that of a bloodless physiognomy. It 
was grievous to think that ere long I might as 
strikingly resemble " a thing that ne'er had life" 
as did respectively H — and B — and P — , whose 
ghostly apparitions flitted before me, like weird 
and warning monitors, their livid features dilating 
in awful elongation, till the sphere proper to the mas- 
ticatory process appeared in each like an emporium 
of ivory tusks. And these, not long since, had been 
" sweet-faced men as one shall see in a summer's day ;" 
and, fitted once to personate Pyramus, could hence- 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 21 

forth be counted as stars — perhaps only as satellites — 
in the Apothecary line for ever ! But the " venerable 
Maid" has no more regard for the pride of the 
physical constitution, than Miss Mary- Ann Walker 
for the pride of the political; and 

" The visage wan, the purblind sight," 

are phases and signs which the prejudices of the 
multitude obstinately identify with ability. I re- 
member once on the ciixuit leaving the court-house or 
hall, at Salisbury, on the heels of smiling Mr. M — ; 
and as he turned a corner, while I remained at the 
window of a book-shop, I overheard a countryman 
say to his companion, alluding to the comely barrister, 
" Now, if I did want a laayer, I wouldna choose he ; 
— Jw he a dale too fat and pleasant-loohiyig for a 
laayer V^ 

Enfin, (dissyllabic darhng of our neighboui's, help 
me to an end!) ejijin, I became that which I am. 
Blackstone, in his " Farewell to the Muse," enume- 
rates a train of penalties, contingent to the fervent 
embrace of "fair Justice," which are penalties although 
poetically clothed, as pills made palatable with sweet- 
meat are still physic. But, comprehensive as is his 
catalogue of contingent ills, there is a remainder un- 
mentioned, before which all recited evils " hide their 
diminished heads :" can the briefless need a reminder 



22 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

that theii^ condition is not included in his catalogue 
of professional calamities? But the sanguine tem- 
perament of youth is not prone to contemplate chagrin 
or privation, and dwells more interestedly on arenas 
of legal contention — anticipates the applausing hum 
of courtS;, the murmured homage to eloquence — fore- 
fancies championship and conquest ; and preconceives 
the florid invocation, resistless argument, and eloquent 
propitiation of a decree, on which are suspended the 
absorbing interests of Life, and Fame, and Honor ; — 
and speeds, by an ideal path, to fortune, preferment, 
ease. Soon on the stoicism of adolescence, ambition 
works; and soon I looked at this, the bright side of 
the scene. Hume (the historian) estimates a natural 
disposition to view things on the sunny side, as more 
than equivalent to a fortune of £10,000 a year. — A 
living economist might think the calculation hasty, 
and feel disposed to cavil at so large a " tottle." In 
embracing law I had, moreover, home anticipations — 
not to reahse, for they were Utopian, but to cherish, 
for they were fond. Advising, after twelve months 
application, with a visitor at the paternal residence, 
on a plain principle, a copious (and superfluous) use 
of technicalities convinced my father that my time 
had been well spent, and threw around me the halo 
of an oracle in the dim eyes of a venerable maternal 
ancestor, who woidd " die happily could she live to see 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 23 

me a judge" — her ne plus ultra of forensic dignity. 
Dear old Lady ! without this anodyne her " sleep of 
death" was peaceful as a pleasant dream, and little 
recked she of the superadded " labor and sorrow" 
that must have been entailed on her by the fruition 
of her wish. For my own part, my aspirations are 
less presumptions ; and a silk gown, wliich never would 
have occurred to her as a desideratum with men, 
would appease my longings and be gratefully ac- 
knowledged. 

Prolixity, O Reader ! is, as thou mayest haply know, 
peculiar to the Law and its disciples ; and if herein 
I stand accused of circumlocution, would that I could 
truly interpret to thee that encouragement to expatiate 
which now I feel, in assured freedom from the frowns 
of impatient jurymen, and the " To the point, Mr. C." 

of courteous baron . Notwithstanding, I believe 

I may safely promise thee that we are hastening to a 
climax. 

On an April morning in 41, I was proceeding to 

my chambers in . I had been engaged during 

the greater part of the night in a complicated inves- 
tigation, and having arrived at an opinion wliich I 
considered to be as well-grounded as it would be 
satisfactory to my client, I was disembarrassed of care, 
and my spirit seemed gifted vrith the volatility of 
an angel's wing. " Town-imprisoned," as gentle 



?4 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

Mary terms it (William Hewitt's Mary, not mine), 
town-imprisoned, we taste but a dilution of the joy- 
enkindling elixir wliich Deliglit, prime almoner to the 
Queen of seasons, pours lavishly by wood, and field, 
and stream, in the golden light of an April morn. 
Yet, weakened as becomes the pure effluence by com- 
mixture with the murky atmosphere of busy haunts, 
it still retains ingredients which inspire' with a joyous 
consciousness of the time ; and even in the clamour 
of a city the heart recognises and leaps lithely at the 
voice of Sprmg. For stony limits may sooner shut 
out Love* than exclude Nature; and when the all- 
animating Spring passes over creation, with her vivi- 
fying breath making the old world young again, her 
influence operates in man like a renewal of God's 
breath of life; and the indefinable exultation which 
rises in his bosom attests but his participation in the 
instinctive and insuppressible sympathy which all 
things living own for youtli — the doctrine of whose 
infinite prolongation in a happier sphere lends the tint 
of transport to fabled felicity, and gilds the pinions of 
a surer and sublimer Hope. Eternal youthl What 
other epoch of existence can imagination appropriate 
to the glad heritage of bliss? Not the dawn of 
capacity, or its decline ; not immaturity or imbecility 

" With Love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls, 

For stony limits cannot hold Love out." — Romeo and Juliet. 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 25 

— but the ever-ripening, ever-rosy Morn; — Morn 
which prevails in perpetuity, and which cannot 
hasten Noon, for Noon is Night's precursor, and 
Night may not spread her sable mantle over the 
E,ealm of the Eejoicing! 

On the morning to which I have adverted, I had 
resigned myself to the Spirit of the Air, — 

" The pleasant season did my heart employ; 
My old remembrances went from me wholly. 
And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy." 

Who has not smiled at his own locomotive irregula- 
rities, when governed by the impulses of an ecstasy 
to which all temporal care is alien, and inspired with 
which, the human heart yearns from its most hallowed 
depths with the boundless desire to bless ? — 

" To me that morning did it happen so;" 

and having, in changing mood and by changing mo- 
tion, nearly attained my destination, I had lingered 
in loving dalliance before the attractive exposition of 
a bibliopolist — one of those tempting arrays of title- 
pages, which to tliis day (unless urged onwards by a 
professional pressure fi-om without,) detain me with 
the virtue of an arrest. There were treatises, by 
master-minds, on the E-eligion which reconciles and 
irradiates life ; on the pharmaceutic Science, by which 



26 ' INTRODUCTOEY CHAPTER. 

purcliasers might secure an immortality ici las ; and 
on Law, by whicli its mysteries were simplified to the 
scale of Readings made Easy. And, above these, a 
rank of Poets, living and dead — if indeed true Poets 
can die — cherished titles all, the humblest of which by 
mere articulation sounds a chord that kindles rapture. 
There were — but what need to recapitulate names 
" familiar as household words?" Last of all stood 
Burns; and, swift as thought, the rapture within me 
found utterance in words of song : 

" O Jjife! how pleasant in thy morning-, 
Young Fancy's rays the hills adorning! 
Cold-pausing Caution's lessons scorning, 

We frisk away, 
Lilie schoolboys at th' expected warning, 

To joy and play T" 

Then, lest I might be longer beguiled by that " sweet 
companie," I receded hastily, and in unconscious 
vicinity with the Old Man too long lost sight of in 
these pages, who had been standing behind me, I 
came into a collision with him so violent and unex- 
pected, that for a moment I was a painful witness of 
a critical experiment on the laws of gravitation. 

Of course I was instantly earnest in apology, which 
was not, he benignantly assured me, needed. There 
are symbols out of Masonry which attest fraternity of 
feeling, and a disposition towards attachment was 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. %i 

suddenly and reciprocally developed in us two. The 
passion of Celia and Oliver, wlio " no sooner looked 
than they loved/" was not quicklier conceived than 
our friendship. He had heard my quotation from the 
Scottish bard, (which I had vented audibly, believing 
myself alone,) and though tolerably well-stricken in 
years, he appeared to appreciate the ecstatic pride 
of life to which the poet has supplied a language. 
We conversed a while and parted, for recollections of 
waiting clients gat hold upon me. But we exchanged 
addresses ; and when — ^in reply to his earnest solicita- 
tion that I would visit him soon, very soon — I promised 
on the evening of the second day to call on him at 
Ivy Lodge, it was with a strong confidence that I 
should find it a " haven where I would be." 



As You Like It. 



COLLOQUY I. 



CHAPTER II. 



" Whate'er you see, whate'er you feel, display 
The Realm you sought for." — Parnell. 

The habitation of the individual with whom I had 
thus become acquainted, and for whom I was sensible 
of a sudden and singular interest, was situate in one 
of the pleasantest environs of London. The daylight 
had not departed when I arrived; and there was 
something in the neatness of its external aspect, and 
in the arrangement of a limited parterre, which be- 
spoke its owner's sense of chasteness and propriety. 
Its character was more rural than, in that neighbour- 
hood, suburban dwellings are in general; and whilst 
its size and situation might have adapted it for the 
retreat of a merchant, the absence of certain customary 
features dear to the soul of a commergant, convinced 
you that it was not the harbour of a merchantman, or 
that if it was, its appearance might be accepted as a 
guarantee for good taste and true gentility. [I pro- 



30 CHAPTER II, 

test, en passant, against any illiberal deduction from 
this remark, which, involves merely a matter of gout 
and not of worth: — I have several unexceptionable 
clients in " the commercial interest," whom I prize 
highly for their prompt payments.] The entrance- 
gate opened by a peculiar catch, and formed part of a 
wood fencing of lattice-work, which, being high and 
over-run with ivy, concealed from pedestrian passers- 
by the lower rooms of the lodge. The house also 
was nearly covered Avith the same vagrant root, dis- 
playing two distinct hues — that which grew upon the 
projections of the building appearing of a darker green 
than that which overspread its recesses. A few vases 
and rustic ilower-stands were dispersed in judicious 
display, and were garlanded with the snowdrop and 
primrose. And facing the doorway was a roomy 
dog-house, from the entrance of which there partially 
protruded (both a type of quaintness and terror to 
petty miscreants) the caput of a mastiff, " life-like 
and awful to view," though merely carved from wood 
and colored (as you discovered on a closer and keener 
scrutiny), and representing the sentinel as keeping 
a vigilant eye upon the wicket, although in couchant 
attitude. 

The public thoroughfare to which the domicile was 
contiguous, was not the most-frequented route to the 
metropolis, although sufficiently peopled; yet, from 



COLLOQUY I. 31 

the height and density of the fence that bounded it^ 
the gate was no sooner closed on the inside, than you 
seemed in an outer realm of Silence, — in a sanctuary 
only intruded upon by the casual note of some wood- 
warbler, 

" soothing, as it sank 

On the lull'd ear, its melody that drank." 

And many a weary wing had its quiet resting-place 
there — not more secure in leafy solitudes, than in the 
depths of that redundant ivy and the guardianship of 
the kind heart it sheltered ! The stillness that reigned 
without the lodge presided more intensely within : — 
it was almost a realisation of Peace made palpable. 
Windows, some partially and others wholly composed 
of amber-colored glass, imparted to the interior " a dim, 
religious light"of that chastened hue, neither silvery or 
golden purely, but a commingling of both, such as you 
may have beheld in the west at eventide, and fancied 
the Day in devotion, ere its lustrous Orb suffused the 
horizon with the deep crimson radiance which con- 
summates his setting. There is a peculiarly-tran- 
quillizing influence in that soft amber light; and 
perhaps from associating it with the quietude that 
prevails at sunset, or with the solemn splendour which 
it sheds over sacred places, we connect it instinctively 
with serenity. The apartment in which I found the 



S2 CHAPTER n. 

genius loci, had an air of luxurious comfort, utterly 
apart from ostentation : the walls supported the effigies 
of six generations of his fathers ; and though the room 
was not large, the chief portion of the space left 
unoccupied by his ancestors was devoted to the accom- 
modation of four capacious bird-cages, ' the lodging' 
(as he observed smilingly, the instant he perceived my 
eye upon them,) ' the lodging of a few parlour-boarders, 
in addition to a numerous singing-class in the eaves 
and leaves without. — I feel,' he continued, in reply 
to a remark I made connected with his in-door aviary, 
" I feel ' a sacred and home-felt delight' in the strains 
of my domestic quire, which, by-the-bye, the last 
few days of warmth and sunshine have driven to such 
excess of riot, as made them almost 

' vex with mirth the drowsy ear of Night:' 

but my joy was well-nigh at an end, and my band in 
danger of being broken up, by a doctrine oihumanity 
taught with the power of poesy by that dear Disturber 
in the North, the undying Christopher of that 
name, for whom I will not impute to you the bar- 
barism of a want of love and reverence. He denomi- 
nates the singing of caged birds ' a rueful simulation 
of music ;' and ' upon this hint I spake,' though loth, 
a sentence of emancipation in favor of that unconscious 
captive roosting on the upper perch there, (still wide 



COLLOQUt I. «J3 

awake, 'per Hercule I ) my feathered knight^ Sir Fre^ 
deric — to whom esteem yourself as introduced. My 
servant is infected with his master's prejudices, and 
did the part of Liberator as lazily as would a more 
reputed son of Fame, were his liberating efforts honO^ 
rary. And indeed my newly-born humanity was nearly 
convulsed at the bird's embrace of Liberty, whom I had 
not heart to hail then as ' the merry mountain nymph j* 
for, independently of the favoritism induced by long 
companionship, I had gloomy forebodings of a compul- 
sory indolence and disenchanted solitude, if the 'fytte* 
caught from the Recreations of Christopher shordd 
have four days' continuance. What matinal employe 
ment could I invent, as a substitute for the duty of 
preparing sustenance for those devourers? That 
same blithe bigot, sir Fred, turns sullen and threatens 
felo de se by starvation if any other hand than mine 
presumes to meddle with his provision; and the 
Queen Dowager — near my honored grandsire's por» 
trait — even she does despite to a hallowed Name, by 
signs of unamiable temper, if other than I prepare 
her royal board. But away — after long pausing and 
beginning late — away went sir Frederic on his ' ad« 
vent'rous flight,' to a shi-ub five yards distant from his 
prison-house, whence, after a perplexing reconnoitre, 
he adjourned to the ivy above the window here. We 
saw no more of the knight until morning, and then 



34 CHAPTER II. 

he was discovered en attendant on the window-ledge,, 
in a frame of feathers 

' That, in the various bustle of resort, 
Were all too ruffled and somewhat impaired.' 

A luckless boon was freedom to sir Fred! The co- 
lonists on the outside — an envious Ishmaelitish 
mobocracy ! — did most despitefully entreat and per- 
secute the yellow-crested knight. But yet — (you 
know the philosophic chant of the Swan of Avon) — 

' There is some soul of goodness in things evil ;' 

and the maladventures of my marred and maimed 
minstrel over-ruled the ultra-liberalism of the North ; 
enabled me with quiet conscience to retain my house- 
hold company of melodists ; and did assuredly qualify 
me, by patient watchings and successful healing, 
for a physician's diploma in ornithological pharmacy. 
— Really I am bound to apologise for permitting a 
mere canary-bird thus early and, perhaps, indeco- 
rously to incite me to garrulity. But I have a 
secret faith that I may, with you, assume the freedom 
of a more protracted intimacy. Read you ever the 
Poet-Preacher (Taylor)'s Sermon on the Marriage- 
Ping?" 

I nodded negatively. 

" No ! Then, abstain from it if you would avoid 



COLLOQUY I. 35 

the state of wedlock! ' No man/ says that divine 
Divine, * can tell, but he that loves his children, how 
many delicious accents make a man's heart to dance 
in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges. 
Their childishness, their little angers, their innocence, 
their imperfections, their necessities, are so many 
little emanations of joy and comfort to him that de- 
lights in their persons and society.' Now I am a 
doating old man, unwedded, and the bu-ds you see 
around me are some of my fondlings — my adopted 
children.'''' 

A tone of voice, soft, and touched with the gentlest 
trill, (not dissimilar to that which, about nine years 
ago, distinguished the bishop of Winchester's,) and the 
peculiar visual expression I have mentioned, gave 
wondrous effect in speech to what may appear tame in 
transcript. His eyel — it was nearly tantamount to 
another tongue, — the mind's interpreter by an optical 
language. And his voice, though not naturally pow- 
erful, was capable of inflexions so nice and gifted with 
intonations so musical, that, together, he spake and 
looked an expiring subject into vivid life again: and, 
making every object he alluded to,"live in description," 
there breathed from him, as he pleaded his concern 
for his feathered family, such ineffable fondness, that 
in the purity of his affection you admired it the more 
for its simplicity, and felt the effect of its eloquence 
to be a new estimation of canaries. 



no CHAPTER II. 

The sanctum in which he was seated, was sur^ 
founded with book-shelves, fitted under, and forming 
an additional support to, his progenitors on the canvas. 
On one side of the apartment were arranged the 
works of prose authors, the back of each serving as 
p, remembrancer of reputation, either time-honored or 
cotemporary ; and the opposite compartment was filled 
with the works of Poets, chiefly British. A volume 
of the Faery Queene, another of Racine, Chalmers' 
Tron Church Sermons, and Les Oraisons Funebres de 
Bossuet, were lying on the table. We discoursed for 
a brief space upon current topics, and the circum- 
stance of our rencontre. He told me of his peculi- 
arities of taste and sentiment, " which are not either 
peculiarities, I trust," said he, in summing them up, 
^' since my best hope is in Religion, my warmest aspi- 
ration for my fellows' good, and my chief pleasure 
in Poetry — which is to Nature (which is all, save 
God !) as the handmaid of a lovely regal maiden, who 
Indicates, and calls upon you to admire, the charms 
0f her sovereign mistress." 

*■ I see," he remarked, when, on a momentary 
cessation, I had glanced at the books before him, 
■** I trace a shadow of surprise, at the diversity of 
writings which appear here in juxta-position. To use 
% phrase familiar tp you, I have turned to them each 
for a rejre^her. My memory, which I kept tolerably 



COLLOQUY I. 37 

' schooled and exercised ' in my youth, plays the 
truant 'in mine age, now I am gray -headed ;' and, 
faithful from period to period, has not fidelity which 
can abide a paragraph. A lady of my acquaintance 
has made my cottage eloquent to-day with the praises 
of Mile. Rachel: her name recalled the Hermione 
of Racine's Andromaque, whom I heard and saw at the 
Theatre Francais. The Englishman's World-painter, 
glorious Will himself, and in his own language, often 
dwindles into doggrel in attempting to jingle; but 
the French tragedial rhyme is intolerable. What 
sympathy can one feel for sentiment, that should move 
with the majesty and ease of a monarch, stalking on 
stilts, and rescued from a monotonous twang only 
by manifest effort?" 

C. — " Little, indeed; though the first-class ar^ 
tistes avoid with much dexterity the gulf which yawns 
at the close of each couplet ! This difiiculty and, to 
us, defect, displays in full-relief the scarecrow which 
Milton designates ' the troublesome and modern 
bondage of rhyming.' " 

E. — " True. You have seen Rachel, then?" 

C. — " I have, but not as Hermione." 

E. — " She is the reigning deesse with our fickle 
friends, whose fashion it is intensely to idolize, or 
to dispatch, unaneled, au diahle. Each line here 
suggests Poetry in a palsy, and occupies nearly as 



30 CHAPTEK II. 

long in reading, as the birth, progression, and decay 
of an affaire du cceur — an amour eternel, in the Centre 
of Civilization. Nevertheless, here are hnes which 
seem to rise from the page with the nerve of 
giants refreshed. Where shall we alight upon a 
scene of conflict more fiery and impetuous than this, 
where every little word on the tongue of a French 
girl becomes a stiletto ! — 

' Ne vous suffit-il pas que je I'ai condamne? 
Queje le hais ; enfin, seigneur, queje V aimed?' 



add to his character of miserable that of murderer ; 
but Rachel, once seen hurling this passion-poisoned 
shaft, in fitful vengeance, at her unhappy suitor — 
he ' sighing like furnace' — can never be forgotten. It 
is indelible as the recollection of a lightnmg-flash 
which in youth may have blasted a human creature 
on your right-hand, and swept by you scatheless — 
horrified but unhui't. I have never before recog- 
nized so forcibly as now I do, in this reminiscence, 
the strength of this sentence of Madame de Stael :* — 
' Tant (Tindividus traversent V existence, sans se douter 
des passions et de leur force, que souvent le theatre 
retele Vhomme d Vhomme, et ltd inspire une sainte 
terreur des or ages de Vdme^ " 

* Sur " i^a De'claQiation." 



COLLOQUY I. 39 

C. — " An axiom, in words worthy the daughter of 
Necker! But you have, there, French eloquence of 
another order — a style which, partial as I am to poetry 
in my proper tongue, claims pre-eminent admiration 
in the Gallic. What an avalanche of the elements 
of oratory, what facile flow of language, what graphic 
delineation, what sonorous adjective-aid, what mel- 
lifluous cadence, conspire, in presence of a lofty am- 
bassador in things divine, to sink (pour le moment J 
the terrestrial; to make " the merry-hearted sigh;" 
and to win, from fair aspirants after bliss, the homage 
of a fervent ' Cetait magnifiquel'' on their return 
from the mass to prepare for the masquerade !" 

E. — " Aye, the preacher's end and aim, conviction, 
is, I fear, a fruit rarely found in profusion ; yet, as it 
regards the discours, many an epic poem has been 
pronounced from a French pulpit. That which Cole- 
ridge is reported to have said of Taylor, that he sel- 
dom wrote prosaically excepting in rhyme, applies 
with equal (probably with greater) justice to the 
superior order of the priests of France — their sermons 
are poetiy, dismounted from the stalking-horse on which 
it paces the stage. Here, for instance, in Bossuet's 
Oraison Funebre de la Reine de la Grande-Bretagne, 
is an exordium of grandeui', worthy to be admired of 
all men, and to sink into the hearts of princes : ' Celui 
qui regne dans les deux, et de qui relevent tous les 



40 CHAPTER II. 

empires, a qui seul appartient la gloire, la majesU ei 
Vindependance, est aussi le seul qui se glorifie de fairs 
la hi aux rois, et de leur dormer, quand il lui plait, de 
grandes et de terribles legons.' And tliis ' solemn 
opening' precedes no ' insignificant conclusion ;' his 
theme throughout is arrayed in apparel befitting its 
majesty, and merits CoUins's quaternity of epithets — 

' Warm, energic, chaste, sublime.' 

If an old man's company should induce you often 
hither, we will scan more intently the legacy of this 
' holie prieste' — and of others, — of Massillon ! That 
mighty painter's name unrols a picture intensely ivild 
in its solemnity. I cannot repeat it verbatim, but it 
occurs to me like a vision of Belshazzar's Feast, or, 
more fearful still, the Deluge,— reviving a multitude, 
in all the horror of madness but without its uncon- 
sciousness, urging their gasping flight from the gorge 
of the on-rolling, inexorable wave. He portrays, as 
already present, the end, and arraigns each soul before 
the tribimal of the visible Judge ! They tell us that 
his words ran chilly as a stream of ice through his 
hearers' veins ; and when you read them you feel an 
involuntary shudder, and almost seem to fluctuate 
on the brink of that dread abyss, over whose despair 
etherial Hope for a moment folds her wings. And yet 
this Massillon, whose every stroke in this picture of 



COLLOQUY I, 41 

awe serves, but suspends, the climax, till his hand is 
suddenly arrested, and the whole concentration of 
imaginable calamity is before you_this Massillon,who 
seizes upon and sways the mind like a despot, and 
urges it through scenes of increasing tumult into a 
mental Reign of Terror — this strife-creating Spirit, 
has a voice placid as the smile of Peace — a strain 
halcyon as a di-eam of Heaven ! And over his xaages, 
as standing yesterday in the open firmament, you ask. 
Can this serene sky have but an instant since been 
canopied with cloud and storm?" 

C. — " The foHe of French preachers, as far as I 
have observed, consists mainly in description and in 
declamation ; and the predominancy of the latter may 
perhaps account for the unsatisfying results of their 
ministry ; the Voice that should penetrate the heart, 
plays pleasantly upon the ear as a tinkling cymbal or 
a dulcimer. I should unwillingly pronounce the 
French to be a frivolous people ; but Gaiety is their 
Diana, and they have not resolution to abstract them- 
selves from the worship of the idol, and to sit down 
in silence, and be thoughtful. I can hardly conceive 
a greater contrast to the general style of the French 
divines, than that which marks the Scottish Chal- 
mers, some of whose sermons I remember to have 
read, and remarked for their apparently-irresistible 
argument.'''' 



42 CHAPTER II. 

K — " Perhaps by Southrons the eloquent Scot is 
better read than heard. But he keeps in awe the 
host of opposing prejudices against truth, which are 
apt to rise now in man, as they have ever risen since 
the Great Rebellion in the year of the world 1, — they 
fall back, I say, before this man, like the army of 
Israel at the advance of Goliath, before the coming 
up of David. Would you enter the lists of contro- 
versy with him, you are sensible of the impotency of 
a stripling, in the iron grasp of a gladiator. Demon- 
stration is the term he chooses for his theological 
motto, and he has a right to it. Read at your 
leisure (if it is one you have not read), this seventh 
of the Tron Church discourses, and if you find a 
loop-hole, admitting the escape of any single shade 
of character from the responsibility of a solemn but 
reasonable self-investigation, then (although a lawyer) 
I will consider your ingenuity stimulated by aid that 
shall be nameless. On the arguments of Chalmers 
Truth stems the wave of worldly opposition as the 
ark rode on the swelling waters. Here is a simile for 
the Scotchman, borrowed from an old divine : it may 
represent the progress of a series of his demonstrations. 
' When the waters of the flood came upon the face of 
the earth, down went stately turrets and towers. In 
like sort, when the waters of affliction arise, down go 
the pride of life, the lust of the eyes, in a word, all 



COLLOQUY I. 43 

the vanities of the world. But the ark of the soul 
riseth as these waters rise, and how too? even nearer 
and nearer unto heaven.'* Those old men speak, do 
they not? with admirable simplicity, and shape you 
out a pleasant picture almost in monosyllables. Is the 
primitive mantle rejected ' from Dan even unto Beer- 
sheba?' is the spi7it of the fathers' style ' interred 
with their hones T " 

C — " Ah ! the moan of discontent with things pre- 
sent, the sigh for past perfections, echoed from the 
Poet there; not captiously, but with the old man'' s 
natural tone of complaint." 

E. — "Complaint! and caught from Edmund Spenser ! 
At what infectious spot?" 

C. — " From this most * musical and melancholy 
chime,' it may be — 

' So oft as I with state of present time 
The image of the antique world compare, 
Whenas man's age was in his freshest prime, 
And the first hlossom of faire vertue bare — 
Such oddes I find 'twixt those, and these which are. 
As that, through long continuance of his course, 
Me seemes the world is run quite out of square 
From the first point of his appointed sourse ; 
And being once amisse grows daily wourse and wourse.' " 

E. — " Upbraid not the Poet for repining at ' the 
ills of Eld ;' — for such, and only such degree of dis- 
* Disce Mori. Sutton* 



44 CHAPTER II. 

content with Earth as lifts him to the lofty enter- 
prise of a New "World! — a land whose lustrous 
outline the piercing eye of the Poet — by Piety di- 
rected — may have traced, — although obscurely, yet 
with sufficient distinctness to animate his hope of 
inheritancy, and his longing for 

— ' that same time when no more change shall be, 
But steadfast reste of all things, firmly stayd 
Upon the pillars of Eternitie, 
Which is contraire to mutabilitie : 
For all that moveth doth in change delight, 
But thenceforth all shall reste eternallie 
With him that is the God of Sabaoth highte. — 
O that great Sabaoth God, grante me that sabbatli's sighte!' " 

C. — " Impressive as Luther's Hymn, heard in 
Westminster Abbey !" 

E. — " Nay, Poetry, of however sublime a birth, 
can never be so effective alone as when wedded to 
Music, and then in the celestial alliance Poetry is the 
■^weaker vessel.' For among all the instruments to our 
delight, there is not one so potent (during its fugitive 
control) or so mysterious as Music. The hind, moulded 
from the clod and almost as senseless, acknowledges 
its irresistible might, as it undulates on his drowsy 
ear, rousing, and charming, and holding captive. — 
And on finer-fibred spirits does it not operate like a 
breaking up within the bosom of the fountains of the 



COLLOQUY I. 45 

great deep!' But its mystery is a nobler and an en- 
nobling theme — a tlieme which is not ' of the earth, 
earthy/ but which has to do with the imagination, 
detaching its wing from a vain brooding over material 
things, and urging it to soar into that vast Realm of 
Anticipation, to which, as the heirs of infinite promise 
and the creatures of infinite hope, we have hereditary- 
right. And making us to marvel, that if such vivi- 
fying influence belongs to the concord of human 
creation, wAa# ecstasy shall be ours amid the minstrelsy 
divine — sounding from the harps of angels, in spheres 
whose secret preparations for his bliss the ear of man 
hath not heard nor can hear !" 

E. was so borne away by the impetuosity of feeling 
excited by his subject, in which his whole being ap- 
peared to be absorbed, that, as he came to a close, his 
faculty of enunciation was impeded, and he pillowed 
his head upon his hand for a minute. The efferves- 
cence had worked away during that interval, and he 
resumed, — his countenance the visible seat of gentle- 
heartedness, and his voice " soft as the west wind's 
sigh,"— 

" ' Though I spake with the tongues of men and 
angels,' I should fail to depict faithfully the dominion 
which this celestial Captivator possesses over me. 
And attributing to it as I do — not the powers of tra- 
ditionary miracle, but yet a mighty power to modify 



46 CHAPTER II. 

tlie harshness of humanity, to mitigate its ruggedness, 
and cause many a tract in the wide wilderness ' to 
blossom as the rose,' — I pant for the promulgation 
from high quarters of a well-advised system of in- 
struction. Next to Holy Truth itself, which the 
Spanish proverb majestically designates the Daughter 
of God — 

' La verdad es hija de Dios ' — 

next to Truth, I venerate its Shrine — next to the 
priceless Pearl, I am anxious for the Ark which bears 
it through the troublous sea of Time : and with the 
impression I have of the ameliorating, spiritualizing 
influence of an extension of the empire of Music, 
I would that the solemnly-aflianced sons of the Mother 
of my Faith — the English Church — were energetic 
in its promotion. Her temples do not yet resound 
with holy song — the vernacular language of Gratitude, 
and the temperature of the frigid zone prevails at 
the ' gate of heaven.' For in praise it is that the 
mighty power of harmony subserves its most majestic 
purpose : — attuned in homage of Him before whom 
so many worlds move in order and ' give out music 
as they go,' it is but the reverberation, as it were, of 
the inaudible but not invisible concord that pervades 
the universe; the sacrifice of accordant sound to its 
refulgent Soul and Source!" 



COLLOQUY I. 47 

C — " The poet Wordsworth, referring to the sud- 
den and spreadmg rise of new churches, describes 
the time as conscious of its ivant. In regard to the 
energy, the absence or paralyzation of which in our 
services you bewail, this consciousness of a privilege, 
in many places inadequately appreciated, and in some 
(excepting in form) passed into desuetude, approves 
itself to be reviving, and in the symptoms of resusci- 
tation which it exhibits, gives us grateful 

■ ' help, when we would weave 



A crofl'n for Hope.' " 

E. — " The wedding- chime for an only child could 
not more sadden me in its first effect, or more gladden 
me in its second, than that past stifling and present 
unshackling of the spirit of reverential song. And 
depend on it our Church will experience a mighty 
strengthening of her sinews in nourishmg this breath 
of song. For her symmetry and fair proportions, 
' long concealed, concealed and cherished long,' are 
developing in our day before children capable of the 
only in-\Tilnerable allegiance — an intelligent one. We 
defend the Faith of our Fathers, not solely because 
our fathers defended it, but because our consciences 
have weighed it, and found it not wanting. And 
thus our attachment combines the deep veneration 
of the soul with the warm affection of the heart. — 



48 CHAPTER II. 

You have alluded to the * joyful haste' with which 
ascending spires and the sound of ' the church-going 
beir are gladdening the land, fertilizing its length 
and breadth. 'Tis the sovereign'st characteristic of 
the age ! The Proposer of Fifty new Churches in a 
single city, will need no elaborate Latin epitaph, to 
invite the praises of posterity." 

The timepiece sounded reprovingly, and I arose to 
leave, taking a slight liberty with Spenser — 

" Ere long the nortlierne waggoner will set 
Ills sevenfold teanie behind the stedfast starre." 

E, — " Ah! Alma Mater has seduced us from the 
Faery Queene, and deafened us to the voice of the 
Charmer. Praise to the name, and Peace to the 
manes of Gentle Edmund Spenser! I have acquired 
a habit of prefixing the epithet ' gentle' to this poet, 
for as / recognize his character in his works, gentle- 
ness was his predominating trait. You seldom meet 
with Edmund in a storm, or behold his eye ' in a 
fine frenzy rolling ;' but he conducts you on a calmly- 
flowing tide, over waters whose little heavings and 
undulations are lit by moonbeams, to a garden which 
you know has golden fruit, for now and then you see 
it ; but the greater part of its produce is netted — some- 
times very thickly netted. And now, if you persist 



COLLOQUY I. 49 

in going, 'A Dieu!'' in solemn French. But, harkye ! 
never reproach gentle Edmund again, unless for this 
— and then hushed as a spirit's voice, for he confesses 
the foible — that ' the whole intention of his conceit is 
too clowdily enwrapped in allegorical devises.'* " 



Letter to Raleigh. 



CHAPTER III. 



THE ELDER PROFFERS AN OPINION UPON 
WORDSWORTH. 

" I cannot mend it, I must needs confess, 
And do remain as neuter." — York, in Rich. ii. 

Three days had elapsed since the interview which 
closed with the last chapter, and in company with 
applications for jpi'ofessional " opinions from all sorts 
of people," Rowland Hill's emissary for the district 
in which my chambers were situate, deposited therein 
on the morning of the fourth day, the original of the 
following: — 

" Ivy Lodge, 9th Ap. 41. 
" Did my parting salutation on Monday night in- 
clude an ' Au revoir?' — I have been di-illing my 
reminiscent faculties ' from morn till eve,' and the 
more I drill with interrogations, the more am I har- 
rowed with doubts. Once for all, cause, I pray you, 
the ' deep umbrage' of my locale to ' prate of your 



52 CHAPTER III. 

whereabouts' whensoever you will, and consider the 
old man here as your friend. I seldom remember to 
inmte; make, therefore, this injunction a ' standing' 
one, like the patriotic war-whoop of ' Hereditary 
Bondsmen!' 

" April is sadly subject to epileptic Jits ; what a 
paroxysm the poor month suffered on Friday ! How 
do you account for the frequent sulkiness of Friday? 
I never cared to plunge into the misty mysteries of 
meteorology, and apprehend, abstractedly, that an 
elemental opposition goes on against the Tory Premier, 
Sol, and that the fine old fellow is overpowered for 
a brief space by an incongruous coalition, lashed into 
foam by a most disorderly tail. 

" But he has recovered the mastery ; and if a bel- 
ligerous radical, in the semblance of a cloud, ventures 
into his presence, and begins to cough or expectorate, 
the gorgeous Minister radiates the splenetic effusion 
with prismatic colors. They who profess to know best 
about it, affirm, that our shoulders sustain an im- 
mense pressure of atmospheric air — I forget precisely 
the amount of pounds, hundreds-weight, or tons per 
square inch of flesh. — The learned in lachrymal lore, 
(I mean the grievance-mongers,) might make some- 
thing of this oppressive fact: is it not enough to be 
taxed for light ? must we be also burdened by air ? — 
Government ought certainly to riiypah this Union; 



CHAPTEJR III. 53 

and the intrepid Phseton of the cabinet shoukl be 
requested to take a diplomatic drive up to Phoebus, 
and plead for a treaty on terms less onerous. 

" Well, with all this ponderosity without, I can 
say or sing (alas! 

' Omnia Tempus edax carpit — omnia sede movet!' 

I was momentarily oblivious of dental deficiencies, 
but remember that I can only say J Je sm's conte?it! 
' Tis happy for us that, thus laden, we have an elastic 
supporter within. By shameless sir Fred ! the sun 
and song of to-day made a safety-valve well-nigh 
essential, as an escape for tumultuous spirits. 

" You may think me here, alone, sans kith, sans 
kin, an old man to be pitied. Spare your compas- 
sion ! Even were all my plumed pets under discussion 
among worms, I have a petticoated pet who enraptures 
because she loves me. You knew not that I had a 
child! — that is, not exactly of mine own, but I love 
her as though she were my very own; and next to 
the thrilling ecstasy in loving, is the exquisite joy in 
the knowledge that one is loved. I became part- 
owner of the darling at her baptism, nineteen years 
ago, and have given her more attention than was 
stipulated ' in the bond,' inasmuch as to the practice 
of piety she adds a taste for poetry. — But the hussy 
has her conceits, — ' gives proof,' as old John Har- 



54 CHAPTER III. 

rington observes^ ' of woman's ways ;' and though she 
doesn't contend with me openly against the sove- 
reignty of immortal Will, her allegiance is weakened 
by the song and sorrow of Mrs. Hemans. 

" It is a necessity of my pen to travel to the end of 
the fourth page; — pardon the cramped characters in 
which I assure you of my esteem. 

" G. E." 

A few days afterwards, towards evening, I turned 
my back upon ' the smoke and stir of that dim sjjot' 
called London, and revisited E. The morning had 
been marked by the ' uncertain glory' peculiar to the 
month ; but the latter part of the day was altogether 
lovely, and the sun set with unusual splendour. — 
E. had observed its radiance, and was watching its 
parting ray when I entered; and had no sooner j)ro- 
nounced my welcome, than he inquired if I had wit- 
nessed the transcendent lustre of the sun's decline. 

It might more justly be entitled a disquisition than 
a colloquy which followed my reply; for, happening 
to incorporate with it a sentiment of Wordsworth, the 
old man remarked, that he had omitted at our previous 
interview to ascertain mj opinion of this Poet, whose 
especial lot it was, he added, neither to be approved 
or discommended in moderation, but who was esteemed 
by the enthusiastic of one class as an angel of light, 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 55 

and regarded by the inveterate of another class as 
a ' despised and broken idoL' 

E. had tacitly and rightly accredited for admiration 
the frequent loans I had levied on the thoughts and 
expressions of Wordsworth, and avowed himself also 
in the foremost rank of the poet's admirers. He ex- 
pressed the sadness, not unpleasing, with which the 
contemplation of the departing sun had filled him — 
a state of feeling aided by solemn reflections suggested 
by the thoughtful Poet; and alluded to a severe 
critique upon his works, which he had recently read, 
indignant with its palpable malevolence; adverting, 
with no profusion of compliment, to that caustic portion 
of the community of critics whose custom it is to 
indite an author's penal settlement with ink of an 
uncommonly-acidulated quality. 

E. — " ' The grand affair,' says Rousseau, ' is, to 
think differently ;'' and the conception which, in the 
pomp and circumstance of publication, issues from 
one mind, is often a signal for the conflict of many; so 
that the dulcet-strain of the few, fitted by education, 
judgment, and reflection, to be Rulers and Guides 
of Opinion, is drowned in the penny-trumpet din 
of the canaille; for it is the proverbial misfortune of 
wisdom that it is diffident — of folly, that it is dogmatic. 
It is the deep river that floAvs in silence — the shallow 
in commotion : and so of minds ; the superficial are 



56 CHAPTER III. 

contentious — tlie sterling, composed. It is unchris- 
tian to detest; but to the hyper-critic the extremity 
of my dislike verges on detestation. When I en- 
counter the profound absurdities of such commentators, 
I ask with Burns (and perhaps with more impatience 
than beseems ' the sere and yellow leaf) — 

' ff honest Nature made vow fools, 
What sails your grammars?' 

Why should my Isle of Palms be made desolate — 
be transformed to a City of the Dead, by the coloring 
of cynicism or of pragmatic stupidity? is the living 
landscape, in which there may perchance be here a 
stunted tree, and there an unseemly hovel — scarcely- 
seen deformities, which leave the whole lovely, — is all 
' the pride of my glory' to be stained, because another, 
whose happiness is not nourished at the, same fount 
with mine, has looked upon this picture with a 
'^jaundiced eye?' Such an one may be spectator, if 
he pleases, but I object to his becoming scribe — unless, 
indeed, to cheapen paper for the chandler." 

C. — " How multitudinous and motley a host have 
levelled insult, contempt, and coarse abuse, at Words- 
worth — his design and its achievement!" 

B. — " Pardon me, the design of Wordsworth is 
yet far from its achievement. Other poets have left 
us much to learn, but Wordsworth more than all ; and 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 57 

the age will be millennial in its character, which 
realizes the heau ideal of this Poet. It might not 
suit the temjser of the present house of commons to 
create a poetic episcopacy, but in the event of such a 
measure the archbishopric should be named from E-ydal 
Mount; and if I smile at the idea, I say it not irreve- 
rently ; for the philanthropic aim of Wordsworth has 
been to purify the avenues of the cotter's mind, and 
render it accessible to a new and noble enjoyment; — 
in few words, to correct the waywardness and wil- 
fulness of humanity by a pleasant ' medicine of 
cherries.'* He who kindles gratitude upon the altar 
of the heart, though he possess not the credentials 
of a priest, has performed an important part of the 
priest's office; and if Wordsworth but succeeds in 
illuming a spot ' wildered else and dark,' he sustains 
the hallowed joy by constant annunciation of 

* the cheerful faith, 

That all which we behold is full of bi,essings.' 

I touch with reverence, profound as Cowper's, the 
pulpit: but in what terms — by what representation — 
can man be more eifectually exhorted, than by this 
belief, to habitiial thanhfidness? — a feeling which 
should ascend, like perpetual incense, before that 

* Sir Philip Sidney. 



58 CHAPTER III. 

' Parent of good,' who ' openeth His hand and fiUeth 
all things living with plenteousness.' " 

C. — " And yet the Propounder of this Poetic Faith 
above all others salutary, has been above all others of 
his order, a mark for the violence of ' envy, hatred, 
malice, and all uncharitableness' — " 

E. — " Provoked, not perhaps so much by the doc- 
trine as by its occasional development. But the lion 
may be stung by gnats, and the stately vessel be re- 
tarded by remorse. The ' mild Apostate from poetic 
rule' was not, happilj^, irritated by petty persecution 
into the scornful silence of misanthropy, and left not 
the argosy, freighted with the principles of his new 
faith, to sink, because of the animalculse that clung to 
its keel. When Wordsworth arose, to announce his 
creed and expound its peculiarities, a thousand arrows 
were launched at his devoted head : ' among them, 
but not of them,' were canons of fearfal fulmination 
— literary ordnance of heavy caliber — which boomed 
like a knell of annihilation upon the ear of the 
period (for each era has its idiosyncratic eye and ear), 
and to Wordsworth then might have been not inap- 
propriately applied a line from Prior* — 

' Lord of his new hypothesis he reigns !' 

The Poet, in his hours of weariness and persecution, 

* Ode on Exodus iii. 14. 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 59 

must, however, have found solace and invigoration in 
an axiom which he has couched in the beauty and 
power of truth: 

— ' Every gift of noble origin 

Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breatli:' 

and surely the prime lineaments of the Poet's aim 
bear the stamp of nobility, and approve themselves 

' Majestic in their own simplicity.' 

I do not, of course, intend the term ' simplicity' to 
apply to those indeterminable hypotheses of a pre- 
vious state of existence, of which Wordsworth is so 
eloquently credulous. That 

' The soul which rises with us, our life's Star, 

Hath had else^vhere its setting, and cometh from afar,' 

is a theory which may dominate in the imagination, 
and glow on the Poet's page, as it does in the Ode* 
from which I have quoted; but it is conjectural, and 
must remain so as long as the immortal part of the 
mysterious compound, man, is ' girdled by mortality.' 
" If I mistake not, it was Seneca who said, that the 
most miserable object which could be conceived, was 
an old man who would be young again. I had been 
young and was old, when first I imbibed with an 
* Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood. 



60 CHAPTER III. 

appetite the spirit of Wordsworth; but I remember 
well there ran along with my blood as it were, a 
rivulet of rapture, at the visible embodiment in lan- 
guage, of innumerable phantoms wherewith I had been 
haunted ; and then, reflecting how comparatively torpid 
were my sensations to what they would have been in an 
earlier day, — then, for the first and last time in my life, 
I felt that I would renew my youth, were its renewal 
in my power. For the doctrines of this poet require 
to be woven with the primary principles of our moral 
and intellectual being, and to grow with our growth; 
they are but grafted on the man; and the elements 
of age, although in casual instances ardent and pre- 
disposed, cannot retain the plasticity of youth : and 
indeed the susceptibility to impression which lends a 
charm to the spring-time of life, would imply insta- 
bihty and be considered as indiscretion in the man of 
maturer years. But even now, when the * wild ec- 
stasies ' of former days are stilled into sober pleasure, 
there are no gradus ad Patiiassum that I tread -with 
a happier or more improved spirit than those shapen 
by the poet Wordsworth." 

E. paused an instant to respire, and resinned with 
a livelier air and less soliloquizingly — 

<f Wordsworth is essentially the Oracle of Nature. 
He has tuned his lyre at many a fount, and some of 
his less legitimate notes are cherished among the 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 61 

' sweet sounds and harmonies' which have their home 
in memory; but when he stands by the side of a 
murmuring stream, in fair field, or flowery dell, 
intent on the portraiture of unheeded loveliness, — on 
redeeming the scene in which he stands, like isolated 
minstrel, from the reputation of a voiceless solitude, — 
and on quickening in all things a spiritual intelligence ; 
then the Poet appears overwhehned with * a sense 
sublime,' and his harp-strings seem wrought of the 
fibres of our very being. He guides the admiring 
eye over the many-featured face of Nature, with a 
rod of enchantment, whose property it is to invest 
Avith grace and gladness every object to which it 
points; and there is not a single exiled feature but 
he rescues it from demerit, and does so endow it 
with charms, that you are led captive to the con- 
fession of a 

— ' glory in the grass and splendour in the flower,' 

And, turning from Nature herself, how touchingly 
does he depict the child, and youth, and man, as 
swayed unconsciously by the Influence above us and 
aroimd, to the intelligent observance of which, man- 
kind in thousands are deadened, by custom * heavy 
as frost.' Here is a cast, not from the lineaments but 
from the characteristics of the child: — refer me, in the 
entire range of poetic delineation, to a happier illus- 



62 CHAPTER 111. 

tration of boyhood and girlhood — the natural im- 
petuosity of the one, the sweet timidity and tenderness 
of the other : — 

' Oh ! pleasant, pleasant were the days. 

The time when, in our childish plays, 

5Iy sister Emmeline and I 

Together chased the Butterfly. 

A very hunter would I rush 

Upon the prey — with leaps and springs 

I followed on o'er brake and bush, 

liliile she — God love her.' — -Reared to hrush 

The dust from off its wings!' 

Call nothing henceforth common; — Wordsworth has 
power to make a child's involuntary gesture poetical, 
and to extract something tangible and to look at from 
an urchin's sigh. 

" Then, too, he has a singular art in sinister strokes. 
We are familiar with the apothegm, that ' Vice, to 
be hated, needs but to be seen ;" but you would not 
for a moment think of imputing flagrancy to a bag- 
man, because he passed a buttercup without halting 
to do it homage ; yet recite, with ordinarily-becoming 
emphasis, the following triplet, and Peter Bell the 
Potter becomes positively an atrocious character, for 
regarding a field-fl 
of a field-flower ! — 

' A primrose by a river's bi'im 

A yellow primrose was to liim, 
And it was nothing more !" 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 63 

I 

" From tlie beginning, in every age, the heaven- 
instructed Poet has recognized in the made a sha- 
dowing forth of the attributes of the Maker; and, if 
devout, has ca,used this discernment of the Deity to 
redound to His praise. It has been the Poet's function 
— and how august a function! — to rend from the 
aspect of Xature the dense veil of indifference thrown 
over it by habitual unconcerned intercourse, and, in 
the winning accents of ' sweetly-uttered knowledge,'* 
to rouse the listless creature to wakefulness, and 
thence to interested watchfulness of the Creator's 
operations; — to convince him that the garniture of 
earth and its starry canopy are not unmeaning dis- 
play or inexpressive adornment, but that all, to the 
observant eye, is significant; — that the humblest 
object which can attract his gaze, though seemingly- 
inanimate or inert, is yet an instrument of design 
in the laboratory of the Lord of all. And perceiving 
in all things traces of the divine handiwork, and 
accepting as infinite the wisdom of the Almighty 
Mechanist, it is an essential part of the Poet's faith 
that nothing has been created vainly, but that the 
minutest object subserves, in its vocation, the inscru- 
table purposes of Omniscience. — And this exalting- 
doctrine has been, I repeat, the Poet's argument 
from the beginning. Hear the muse of Chaucer 
* Sidney. 



64 CHAPTER III. 

attesting his credence^ in the early lispings of our 
mother-tongue : — 

' Eternalle God that through thy purveyaunce, 
Ledist the worlde by certaine governaunce. 
In idle, as men saine, ye nothing malce.' 

Woukl not the time fail me to recount by name 
the illustrious succession of Defenders of this Faith ? 
and have they not — each minstrel in his ministry — 
received a special gift? all, save Two of an unbounded 
realm — Wanderers by every of the thousand rills 
which flow ' from Helicon's harmonious springs.' 
YeSj to each, in his demonstration of the divinity 
perceptible in man's daily walk, has been allotted his 
individual province ; and in his own peculiar empire 
Wordsworth stands pre-eminent. For him it is not 
enough that the silent wood be invested with ca- 
thedral solemnity and grandeur ; he creates a priest- 
hood by the wayside. He will not that our path 
through the Desert to the Garden be coldly allowed 
to possess occasional attractiveness ; he clears a film 
from the traveller's eye, and his pilgrimage becomes 
not pleasurable only, but enchanting. It sufiices him 
not simply to describe the earth's glory — he dissects 
it ; and beneath the soft enamel of this lowly flower, 
he will trace its vivid veins and arteries, and will 
impress you with so acute a sense of its life, that 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 65 

thenceforth you feel it would be inhumanity to crush, 
with careless foot, the ^active principle' in form so 
sensitive and lovely. He will not that you look upon 
the tree, to admire its outline only, or even that you 
gather an abstract morality from its foliage, now fair, 
now withering; he claims for it an eloquence more 
subtile — he insists that its leaves are legible. He 
represents all things, in heaven above and on the earth 
beneath, as ministering to man's faith and hope; and 
would amalgamate all the heart's affections in one 
predominating Jt>a55^o?^ of charity — one grand, absor- 
bing fi-ater-feeling, whose flow of love should be 
ceaseless as the mercies of God ! 

" If Shakspeare, in a signification comprehending 
his intuitive famiharity both with man and the scene 
in which he moves, has been styled Nature's darling* 
to "Wordsworth (in an especial scenic signification,) 
may be applied the title, by himself suggested, (not 
to himself appropriated,) of Nature's foster-child ; 
and undoubtedly those are his master-strokes which 
he draws when clinging closest to the Mother's 
breast : — theti 

— ' the rich stream of music winds along. 
Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong, 
Through verdant vales:' 

yet, as I think I have already remarked, the strings 

* Progress of Poesy. 



66 CHAPTER III. 

of the Poet's lyre are sometimes sounded in a key 
less legitimate, though scarcely-less euphonious, pro- 
ducing strains which fly instinctively to the home of 
Music within us, and take up their welcome abode 
there. I have no intention to particularize his mis- 
cellaneous charms ; but lest I ' talk you dead,^ or, at 
least, into slumber, I will refresh you by the repetition 
of one only : on the tympanum of an ear tuned, like 
yours, to the Wordsworthian chant, the sonnet I am 
about to recite has the rousing power of a trumpet on 
a war-horse; and tell me who has ever found an 
utterance for the Spirit of indignant Patriotism, in 
sentiments plus grands et solennels. A noble Spaniard, 
as you will remember, is contemplating the overtures 
made to Spain by Napoleon: — 

• We can endure that he should waste our lands, 
Despoil our temples, and, by sword and fiame. 
Return us to the dust from which we came ; 
Such food a tyrant's appetite demands: 
And we can brook the thought, that by his hands 
Spain may be overpowered, and he possess. 
For his delight, a solemn wilderness 
JVhere all the Brave lie dead. But when of bands 
Which he will break for us — he dares to speak. 
Of benefits, and of a future day 
When our enlightened minds shall bless his sway — 
Then the strained heart of fortitude proves weak! 
Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare 
That he has power to inflict what we lack strength to bear.' 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. t>7 

'' It is delightful to recall the beauties of Words- 
worth, — to the severe be left the banquet furnished 
by his defects. The age is not yet prepared to ap- 
preciate the Poet in his fulness; and our hopes for 
the ultunate universality of his faith, repose, with all 
our other hopes, in the Future. He has left to his 
kind a telescope, which does not create, but which 
uncurtains the created and existing; — ^which charms 
both the eye and the mind; to the one, revealing and 
expanding forms of beauty; — to the other, unfolding 
the secret meaning of a myriad of things ignorantly 
deemed insensate : like the forbidden fruit in Eden, 
but without its restrictive penalty, to the eye it is 
pleasant ; — ^by the mind, ' to be desired to make one 
wise.' But the eye — the eye of the period needs sub- 
limation; 'this muddy vesture of decay' doth yet too 
grossly close in its visual faculty. Man and Nature, 
as they appear through the telescope of Wordsworth, 
assume no ideal grace, no visionary excellence; but, 
clothed by Philanthropy, they exhibit a comeliness 
which engenders optimism, rendering it, as far as 7nan 
is concerned, 

— ' a joy to think the best 
We may of humankind ;' 

and, in reference to his position in nature, enforcmg 
our acquiescence in the assertion, 

* Thy lot, O Man! is good, thy portion fair.' 



68 CHAPTER III. 

" "Wordsworth has been the subject of censure be- 
cause he has corroborated the proof of past ages, 
that the nobleness of indomitable zeal is frequently 
heedless of the barriers erected by Opinion and the 
prevailing Taste ; and because he continues the chain 
of evidence attested by the illustrious of yore, that 
Energy, when Herculean, is liable to the error of 
excess, in its manifestation. One so wise as he, 
would eschew the pretension to faultlessness ; and who 
woidd defend the exemption from fault of either 
Shakspeare or Milton? Johnson, in Rasselas, con- 
tends, that imperfections are reasonably to be ex- 
pected from those ' who have much to do ;' and 
Wordsworth, as the Founder of a Faith, promulgated 
in the clamour raised by prejudice, had confessedly 
' much to do.' Yet the dauntless champion has sur- 
vived to witness his creed become one of earnest and 
increasing acceptation, and the confessions of grateful 
proselytes deck, gloriously as garlands, the Poet's 
retreat. May an old man's benediction be permitted 
to mingle with the heart-thanks which flow to the 
Seer of Rydal Mount — to Wordsworth, of the 
intellectual creditors of our age, a Chief among ten 
thousand!" 

During the greater portion of the time occupied in 
the delivery of this comment, E.'s manner had been 



CHAPTER III. 69 

marked by a gravity whicli contrasted strongly with, 
the vivacity he had displayed at our previous inter- 
view. Now and then, at the recurrence of an image 
moulded in poetic grace, or in recapitulating the 
Poet's claims to praise, his eye brightened and his 
energy revived; but for the most part his air was 
similar to that of an individual in soliloquy. His 
dissertation, void alike of effort reflective or enun- 
ciatory, flowed like a tranquil current of articulate 
thought — its progress stayed for a moment at unfre- 
quent intervals, and again calmly resuming its on- 
ward course, as a stream, which petty obstacles at 
times impede, is soon impelled by accumulating 
waters rearward. As soon as E. had fairly ended, I 
recalled him to his former self by preparing for de- 
parture; and starting at once into jocularity, he said, 
" Now if I were of that unenviable temperament 
which glorious Will has sketched, odious as the 
person of an Italian mendicant taken in yellow chalk, 
— if, I say, I was in danger of ' creeping into the 
jaundice by being peevish,'* I'd vent my spleen like 
a simoom, at being thus ensnared by your quiescence 
into that besetting sin of age, prolixity. My plea is 
that of the disordered Lear, ' I am an old man; pray 
you now forget and forgive.' I protest that the softer 
sex are libelled by the Talmud, which asserts, that 

* Merchant of Venice, act 1, scene i. 



70 CHAPTER III. 

of ten measures of garrulity awarded to our race, 
tlie women took nine! — 'tis rank injustice. Sir. By 
the name of Patience, for two tedious hours have 
you borne with a burr, narcotic as the motion of a 
spinning-wheel! It does not break my heart, this 
consciousness of culpability, but it reminds me of the 
wail of Ithocles, in the Broken Heart of Ford — 

' I now repent it: this now is now too latel' 

Shade of the Poet ! regard benignly a parody propped 
upon certitude and uttered in contrition — 

Our tongues elongate as our days decline. 

" Before you leave, hear, at least, my request, that 
you will defer till morning your return, in future. 
Express, if it please you, the astonishment of the 
lawyer, at the absence of ' cauld-pausing Caution ;' 
but I ken more of you than you may suppose. — Are 
you not retained in the case of S — v. Wainright?" 

I replied in the affirmative. 

" Eh hien : the plaintiff has supplied me with wine 
these fourteen years past, and has made me his con- 
jidant on several occasions. On the morning in which 
my corns so narrowly escaped a crushing, and I was 
threatened with Burns upon hunnions, I was on a 
mission to the merchant's house ; and, while there, his 
solicitor entered to communicate an opinion of Mr. C. 



CHAPTER III. 71 

I ascertained the identity of this Mr. C. with the 
carnal cataclysm which had nearly overwhelmed me 
at the bookseller's window; and when the solicitor 
retired, S — related the particiilars of his suit, as 
well as certain professional incidents to yonr personal 
credit; amongst them, the defence — " 

I had long been on terms of intimacy v/ith the 
good-hearted vintner, whom to know was to esteem; 
and remembering his loquacity, and apprehensive of 
exaggerated commendation, I felt a slight effeminate 
tinge getting the better of my professional sang froid 
— a mark of modesty so monstrous, that the old man 
reined-up abruptly, and exclaimed, astounded, 

" What, Sir ! a blush on the face of a lawyer !-^I 
vow, then, the bar is basely slandered and maligned; 
the calumny of the Talmud, after this, sinks into a 
^ soft impeachment ;' and in dilating upon the sensi- 
tiveness requisite to appreciate Wordsworth, I have 
not, after all, been feeling for a pulse in the dead!" 

I bore with aU the fortitude I could summon, the 
raillery excited by the display of a constitutional 
infirmity which I had hardly mastered at that time, 
but which, fortunately, does not now interfere with 
the imperturbable nonchalance so essential to the 
legal profession, wherein a reputation for wisdom 
is not a little favored by the preservation of a wintry 
exterior. Women must have the compassion of angels 



72 CHAPTER III. 

to wed with lawyers, of first-rate, unco-guid, phy- 
siognomical advantages (professional), cased up, as 
they appear to be, in a covering " of that complexion 
which seems made" of soiled skins, — a hue bloodless, 
but less like the untrodden snow on Linden, than 
that in a lane, which is in process of thaw, and dingy. 

Previously to leaving Ivy Lodge on this second 
occasion of my visit there, I had determined upon 
obtaining information of the comings and goings of 
the " child" mentioned in E.'s letter; and as it 
appeared probable that I should " return unexpe- 
rienced," unless I made it a matter of interrogation, I 
entered on a delicate and indirect examination, which 
elicited for the maiden the ready Elder's affectionate 
praises, and for me, sufficient data whereupon to 
determine my next appearance at the Lodge. E.'s 
fondness and fervour for his god-child was of that 
order of love, which, according to Scott, has in it 
" less of earth than heaven ;" and the old man's tone 
was so thankful for this treasure of his heart, that, as 
he indulged in its expression, his feelings deepened 
and his voice grew tremulous — imparting to his lan- 
guage and gesture an eifect of indescribable pathos. 

" God's name be blessed!" said E. looking upwards 
with patriarchal grace, " His mercy be praised, for 
this one gift, that having endowed me with the heart 
to love, I am not left in the wide world to mourn in 



CHAPTER III. 73 

loneliness that undiscovered one, for whom, if absent, 

our Human Nature supplicates, with plaint fathomless 

as the source of life, and holy as the hope of heaven ! 

For it is of heaven, this longing, when pure, to lavish 

our heart's wealth upon kindred or friend; and even 

where, as here, the strong aiEnity of blood is wanting, 

the great Father of love doth sometimes implant a 

principle exotic, mightier or purer than which I can 

hardly conceive to dwell in man. Once — lang syne — 

I might have cherished the hope of closer ties, and did 

cherish; and e'en now, encompassed with blessings 

from an overflowing Hand, this rebel heart is apt 

to repine for what the Father willed not ; and stirs to 

re-invest with the sufferings and sorrows of this lower 

world, a spirit which — thanks to the Finisher of our 

Faith — it is my confidence, as that I live, is numbered 

with that happy band from whose faces God hath for 

ever wiped away all tears. There is a stanza of 

Campbell, in the solemn plaintiveness of which I 

seem to hear again that angel's breath, when putting 

off mortality : — 

' Clasp me a little longer, on the brink 

Of fate, while I can feel thy dear caress; 

And when this heart hath ceased to beat, oh! think. 

And let it mitigate thy woes' excess. 

That thou hast been to me all tenderness. 

And Friend to more than human friendship just. 

O I by that retrospect of happiness, 

And by the hopes of an immortal trust, 

God shall assuage thy pangs when I am laid in dust.' " 



COLLOQUY 11. 



CHAPTER IV. 



^' And sure there seem of human kind 

Some born to shun the solemn strife; 
Some for amusive tasks designed 
To soothe the certain ills of life, 
Grace its lone vales with many a budding rose, 
Call forth refreshing shades, and decorate repose." 

Shenstone. 

There were three soiils in the sanctum at Ivy Lodge 
on a laughing day in merry May. The Church, 
by a straight-forward, honest, and rather aiFecting 
process, and without the aid of or pretension to magic, 
has since reduced those three into two, by joining 
together one of the three and myself, and prohibiting 
the putting us asunder. I have before hinted at this 
" catastrophe." That eulogistic description in detail 
which it would have been excellent gratification to 
attempt for E.'s god-daughter unyoked, would be 
egregious impropriety under existing circumstances. 
I have two codes of law, by one of which I regulate 



76 CHAPTER IV. 

my conduct socially, and by tlie other, my conduct 
professionally; and so far am I from confounding the 
dictates of the former with the suggestions of the 
latter, that, out of court or chambers, I am painfully- 
jealous in avoiding equivoke and exaggeration, and 
am careful, when doffing the coif, to put on candour. 
It requires but little art or diligence, so to whinow 
the testimony of an interested witness as to reduce it 
to chaff m the judgment of a jury of yeomen, and to 
inspire contempt for the individual discredited. The 
portrait of a young wife, drawn by her husband, and 
he peradventure uxorious, could hardly be set up for 
the scrutiny of Candour, the mind of the painter being 
intoxicated by a very grateful hallucination, which 
blinds him to the fault of an extravagant use of ver- 
milion. So, like Bassanio before the gaudy golden 
casket, " I will none of it." It may be suiferable to 
laud the object of one's love, while yet advancing on 
that pathway of pleasant meanders which have their 
terminus at the church-porch; but that goal once 
attained, the sound of rhapsody beyond grates on the 
general ear, and incites to sarcasm and a search after 
hlots. I restrain my ink, therefore, at the chops of a 
channel, into which, if its current once entered. Im- 
partiality might be deluged, and the pilotage of 
Prudence despised. It is comfortable to hear the 
cooing of old couples, who, having well-nigh ended 



CHAPTER IV. 77 

their journey over the thorny wiklerness, and loving 
the more tenderly for its lacerations, are justified in 
the congratulation, that the hazardous result of custom 
has approved itself in reciprocal solace, not in satiety. 
But I distrust the discretion of those who, barely 
entered on the perilous noviciate of the nuptial noose, 
announce their conjugal felicity to be secured on a 
lease for life, and confidently calculate upon realizing 
a vague amount of bliss, equivalent to Paradise re- 
gained. Experience, however, like the wary inspector 
of a building-plan, made captivating by impracticable 
embellishments, reminds the credulous and eager 
candidates for so blissful a possession, that the paradise 
which fascinates them exists merely in design; — that 
the soil fde la naiMre humcdne,) is always uncertain, 
and may be sometimes treacherous, concealing stub- 
born rocks and gnarled roots ; — that this portal of the 
home of Pleasure, to-day gaudy in fanciful decoration, 
may to-morrow be made grotesque by mutilation, or 
be pitilessly shattered by storm; — and that the fabric, 
in its best estate, lodges, with its possessors, a little 
reptile-horde of bickerings in embryo, which, exposed 
to a particular heat, burst from the shell at once into 
vigour, and are deadlier in. their enmity than armed 
men. These cautious cavils raised by Experience 
are not agreeable to dwell upon, but they lend no 
feeble aid to Prudence, in advising the suppression 



78 CHAPTER IV. 

of a premature proclamation of happiness which is 
to he. " The world's a stage" on which the scene 
sometimes shifts as soon as the poor player has strutted 
a few paces; and in the scene of a marriage, the 
merry bridal-peal has often almost subsided into the 
note of burial; — so brief the intermission between 
transport and the tomb. To sum up, therefore, I 
conceive it better becomes the newly-married to be 
taciturn than babblers about bliss, lest at any time a 
nuptial dirge should suddenly succeed a nuptial ditty. 

The month of May could never have presented a 
comelier aspect or have diffused a kindlier influence 
than at the time of which I have spoken. The quire 
about Ivy Lodge were distending their tiny throats in 
fugue and forte music; and the Elder's eyes were 
ready to leap from their socket, in a perfect fever 
of exhilaration. 

E. — " ' Welcome hither, as is the spring to the 
earth !*' Mr. C. By frantic Fred ! (Mary, is that bird 
inebriated?) by sir Fred! we are to-day most highly 
favored. My daughter-in-baptism. Sir; — Mary, this 
is Mr. C, who promises to surpass thee as a patient 
listener, child; — ^nay, no incredulous smile; 'tis honest 
verity, I vow. We practice here. Sir, no ' fashion or 
ceremony — the appurtenance of welcome,' as Hamlet 
hath it; and had '^the old sexton, Tinie,'t plyed his 
* Winter's Tale, act 5, scene i. t Taylor. 



COLLOQUY II. 79 

pickaxe less lutiAesslj j)armi les dents, I'd sing you 
a strain of welcome, shrill as sir Fred's. Seriously, 
Madam, is our parlour becoming a republic? — tbese 
yellow villains take unwonted licence when the Lodge 
is under female government, and I may as well go 
whistle to the wind as call the rioters to order. — 
Silence, ye chartists ! Prithee fetch wool, good Mary, 
wool, for the ears of Mr. C. — I have cause to be con- 
cerned for a faculty of hearing so long-suffering !" 

How pleasant it is to look upon the evidence of a 
heart flooded with guileless mirth — a respite and 
relaxation from the weary round of " lamentation, 
and mourning, and woe !" There is a charm in the 
wild shout of careless childhood, a richness in the 
glad eye kindling at the call to revelry, which, to 
hear and see, is to the care-worn as water to a 
thirsty land. And, when tempered by an instructed 
mind, not less delightful is it to witness gieefulness 
in old age — signs of greenness about the trunk of 
the venerable tree, against which the tempests of 
time have poured out their violence indestructively 
— testunonies that the advances of Decay and prox- 
imation with the Grave have brought no gloomy 
Winter upon the sord ; and promising to the hoary 
traveller, as he totters to the tomb, the calm of a 
protracted Autumn, submerging at last into the glories 
of an eternal Spring ! 



80 CHAPTER IV. 

E. — " A revered friend of mine had only left us as 

you entered, tlie Rector of tlie parish of , two 

miles hence. How I wish you had come earlier. 
Mr. F. is, like myself, a sexagenarian; and my views 
on church polity and construction of doctrine coincide 
with his in every particular. Have you ever met with 
persons with whom you felt a pleasure — an active 
pleasure in diifering; and others, with whom to dis- 
agree was to maintain integrity at the expense of real 
regret? Mr. F. is, in my circle of acquaintance, of 
this latter class ; a man of so much worth and sound 
judgment that it would be grief to me to differ from 
him. Then we are both thorough sticklers for the 
excellency of Holy Mother ; but though her reverend 
son and servant will not bate one jot to her adversa- 
ries, he maintains the meekness of the Christian 
champion; and while, as from a superior eminence, 
he looks down upon ' the errors and wanderings, the 
mists and tempests in the vale below, his prospect is 
chiefly with pity, not with contemptuous pride.'* 'Tis 
verily music to the mind to hear that eloquent old 
man recounting the virtues and superiorities of his 
Mother — for we both so designate our Church; and 
F., who has written poetry in his time, and has a 
strong perception of the native power of words, de- 
clares, that the force of a volume of affectionate 
* Bacon. 



COLLOQUY II, 81 

epithets is compressed in this fond appellative, Jfo^Aer / 
If the liberty of Truth were again subjected to the 
shackle, F. is one of the many who possess, and 
would prove, the constancy and courage of a martyr. 
The excellent man comes here occasionally, but only 
too rarely, and we congratulate each other upon the 
growing influence and cheering prospects of the 
Establishment; and when he tarries leisurely, and 
Mary is not here to suiFer penance by speechlessness, 
we indulge in chess — at which (in modesty 'tis spoken) 
— the layman is rather more aufait than his teacher." 
C. — "Apropos of chess: I was amused the other 
day in reading extracts from an ancient and curious 
book, entitled ' The Game and Playe of the Chesse, 
translated out of the French, and imprinted by William 
Caxton. Fynysshed the last day of Marche, the yer 
of our Lord God a thousand foure hondred Ixxiiij.' 
The book is considered, upon high authority, to have 
been the first work printed in England; and in it the 
translator assumes for the game of chess a high moral 
ground: he dedicates his book to the duke of Clarence, 
to whom he sends ' peas, healthe, joye, and victorye; 
not presumyng to correcte or empoigne ony thynge 
agenst his noblesse, but to thentent that other of what 
estate and egrese they stand in, may see in this said 
lityll booke, that they governed themself as they ought 
to doo.' He dates the origin of the game to the time 

M 



82 CHAPTER IV. 

of Emsmerodach, king of Babylon, ' a jolly man,^ 
without justice/ and a parricide; and states as 'the 
first cause wherefore it was founded, — to correct and 
reprove the king.' He quotes the 'holy doctour 
saynt Paule,' where the apostle says that ' alle that is 
wrytten is wrytten unto lerning;' and he intends, 
though he travels to a little distance in expressing it, 
that his ' lityll and syniple booke' should lessen ' the 
nombre of foles, which, saith Salamon, is infenyte.' 
And in a second edition of his book, he asserts, ' that 
the kyng, that tofore tyme had been vyctous, and dis- 
ordynate in his lyuyng, was made just and vertuous, 
debonayr, and ful of vertues unto all peple. And a 
man that lyuyth in thys world without vertues lyueth 
not as a man, but as a beste. Thenne, late every 
man, of what condycion he be that redyth or herith 
this litel book redde,take thereby ensaumple to amend 
hym.' And for as many as read it leniently, he ' shal 
pray, that God, of his grete mercy, shall reward them 
in his euerlastyng blisse in heuen, to the whiche he 
brynge us that wyth his precious blood redemed us. 
Amen.' " 

E. — " The pious perorations of the olden time would 
now be deemed ' preposterous conclusions.' Such a 
termination to a modern treatise on chess, would be as 
unexpected, as the recent benediction of a preacher, 
who, after enumerating the merits of an exemplary 



COLLOQUY II. «3 

spinster deceased, and representing her to the special 
imitation of the single sisterhood, ending by observing 
to them — ' Thus she lived, and thus she died, a 
blameless old maid — wMch that you may all do, may 
God of his hijinite goodness grantj' 

" You expressed, some time ago, the interest which 
conjecture upon the mystery of music possessed for 
you. Very various are the tastes of men. One 
of my most-esteemed friends, a man of fine poetic 
feeling, and whose memory is a kind of poetic jewel- 
house, has assured me, that he should be disappointed 
to find the influence of music, under any development, 
a chief ingredient in the joys of heaven. He and the 
Rector of — are at antipodes in this opinion; and I 
once heard the pastor persuade his people to value 
the unheeded privilege of assimilating their worship 
to the adoration of the angels, in terms which I 
cannot forget, and with impressiveness of manner 
which I cannot imitate. Thus spake, emphatically, 
the zealous priest: 

" ^ It is the peculiar province of Sacred Music to 
liberate the immortal mind from the thraldom of 
earthly thoughts; and on the wings of holy harmony 
the soul uprises towards heaven. In sacrificial song it 
is that the homage of the sinner and the seraph cor- 
respond in character, however dissimilar in degree; 
and, when sincere, it is a religious rapture of the 



84 CHAPTER IV. 

supremest order of delight. It gives birth, to an 
indescribable joy, but Piety is reconciled in it, and 
the majesty of the Most High propitiated, for it is 
that pure joy which is the inspiration of Innocence 
and the expression of Gratitude. [F. paused for a 
moment, with a countenance of intense solemnity, and 
you might have heard the heaving of your bosom in 
the profound silence of the sanctuary — for evening 
had hushed the world.] Oh ! lamentable unconscious- 
ness of its overwhelming debt to the Power which 
might have hurled us into the abyss of torment, but 
for the Love which would aUure us to the realms of 
bliss ! — deplorable insensibility to Mercy, or alarming 
indifference to its manifestation, is that of the heart 
torpid and voiceless in presence of Him in whom it 
lives, and moves, and has its being. How marvellous 
the contradiction and the coldness too often visible 
in the demeanour of Christians, congregated osten- 
sibly for united praise ! Would it not be rational to 
study the example, and strive to emulate the fervour, 
of beings who worship in a loftier sphere ? — there is 
not a reasonable soul in this assembly but responds 
affirmatively; but, alas! of this assenting throng 
how few are there who do not condemn themselves 
in the acknowledgment. What! confess that the 
celestial example is worthy of all emulation, and yet 
abide in this thankless and unbroken lethargy! — 



COLLOQUY II. 85 

Lie tlie grateful emotions of your hearts so wofuUy 
congealed, that the sunbeams of that Love which 
burns incessantly, cannot dissolve their icy bondage; 
and the brightness ' which maketh the eyes of the 
angels to dazzle,' can it not dispel that gloom which 
overshadows the mind, dense almost as the darkness 
of chaos, ere God commanded that there should be 
light. ' It is meet and right, and our bounden duty, 
with angels and archangels, and all the company 
of heaven, to magnify the Lord God of sabaoth :' — 
avowing this, quit ye like men, and as you avow so 
act, each one of you ; for think ye, my brethren, that 
sombre Silence inhabits the bright land to which we 
hasten? — think ye, that in the clime whose very at- 
mosphere is harmony there lives one songless spirit; 
— that among all its countless myriad of minstrels 
there could exist one sullen lyre ? 

" ' Sacred Music ii-radiates the mysteries of Faith 
with the glow and the gorgeousness of imagination, 
and induces a sense of exaltation, wherein 

' We feel that we are greater than we know:' 

thus, its influence subjugates the grosser qualities of 
the heart; expands its nobler capacities; familiarizes 
its conceptions with whatsoever things are piure; ad- 
vances the mortal to the dignity of a ministering spirit ; 
and accelerates the progress of the mind towards that 



86 CHAPTEK IV. 

eminent altitude of perfection, which, while imprisoned 
in its earthly tabernacle, the soul has not freedom to 
attain. The assurance of a vast beatitude, too exqui- 
site for the recognition or comprehension of dege- 
neracy, is the revealed distinction between the supreme 
enjoyments of heaven and the subordinate pleasures 
permitted to the upright of the world ; but the grate- 
ful power of harmony on the complicated machinery 
of natural passion, would encourage in us the expec- 
tation, that the large bounty of enthroned Benevolence 
has mingled the raptures of choral consummation 
with the guerdon which awaits His people. And 
this anticipation is not only permissible, but war- 
rantable on sure and certain evidence; for not alone 
are His felicities affirmed to be indistinguishable by 
human eye and inconceivable by human heart; it is 
likewise pronounced concerning them, that the ear of 
man hath not heard the rich reward which God hath 
in reserve for them that love Him. 

" ^ The dynasty of depravity in the constitution 
of man has, in truth, despoiled the purity of those 
glorifying strains vernacular to the stainless soul; 
and anthems ascending with simultaneous charm from 
the high estate of primal innocence to the sphere of 
the excellent glory, have been exchanged by its 
dominion for dissonant and broken music. Yet — 
though sin and sorrow have subdued the tone of man's 



COLLOQUY II. 8T 

rejoicing — the victory over Death, the purification 
from defilement, redemption, unmerited providence, 
the wiping away of tears, and the eternal joy, are 
themes which remain to our fallen race ; and invited 
to a reconciled Father, his rescued children may well 
forget their fleeting infirmities in the interminable 
perspective of peace — their light aiflictions in the 
glad heritancy of a weight of glory, and still delight 
to come before His presence with a song!' 

" This," continued E., '' is all that Mary and I 
could bring away, for closet-consideration; but the 
effect of F.'s discourse, aided, as I have remarked, by 
an extraordinarily-impressive delivery, was highly 
gratifying ; and when you attend his church, you will 
not fail to remark there the ' meek fervour of devo- 
tion,' which Wordsworth laments as a characteristic 
of ancient piety, unfound in the modern : nor will you 
wonder that the multitude should be all absorbed in 
the moving eloquence of the Church's petitions, when 
you hear them, in all their sacred force and compre- 
hensive meaning, from the lips of this pious man, 
who, imputing to form and ceremony no availing 
influence per se, does not therefore disdain to demand 
veneration for antiquity, and cement attachment by 
representations and persuasions, which the suspicious 
rather than devout might pronounce to be conducive 
to a super stitioxis regard, but which, by more ingenuous 



88 CHAPTER IV. 

disciples, are found to promote an ardency of affection 
for Xheform, which aids rather than supersedes the 
spirit of a reasonable worship. The signs of the 
times induce an apprehension, that the bosom of the 
Church will be agitated ere long by ultra-advocates 
of two classes — the one insisting too pertinaciously on 
precision in ritual ceremonies ; the other, displaying a 
lax observance, amounting, in the indiscreet, to dis- 
respect and contumely, exceedingly to be deprecated. 
The tenets of F. are, I conceive the juste milieu; and 
the calm authority of opinions such as his, will main- 
tain our holy Mother's eqiulibrium, until her querulous 
children shall ' cease from troubling.' Many there 
are who prophecy ^Woe to Ariel!' some in timid 
alarm, in envious gratulation others, at the prospective 
issue of these dissensions ; and an old friend — a kind 
of brother in my youth, alack! a weary distance to 
look back upon — would have made me melancholy a 
few days ago, if gloomy predictions from a venerable 
prophet could have prevailed over anticipations more 
sanguine. I wish you to understand the complexion 
of that virtue which F. attributes to the extraneous 
circumstance of antiquity and of hereditary sonship. 
He would urge his flock to scrutinize the intrinsic 
strength and moral grandeur of the Ark of our Faith, 
— to mark tcell her bulwarks ; and is content that by 
her own merits she stand or fall. Then, after demon- 



COLLOQUY II. 89 

strating her essential pre-eminence over the sects 
of dissent, will he press her upon onr aiFections by 
energetic arguments ah extra. — ^ Our fathers^ says 
he, ' our fathers reared this Ark, despite of terrors 
— never be their holy heroism forgotten ! — and having 
launched it on the tide of Time, they committed 
themselves to its guardianship ; and generations have 
since been borne in it to ' the haven where they would 
be.' And in our voyage through time, shall we hesi- 
tate to embark in that imperishable vessel, which has 
survived the wreck of ages and which shall survive ? 
* From the cradle to the grave we are on the stormy 
sea;'* but, men and brethren, may we not well exult, 
that in trusting the treasure we carry with us to the 
keeping of the Ancient Mariner, we are able to confide 
in our Pilot? And shall we, then, look indiiferently 
on, while the foes of the ship we sail in are attempting 
to dismast the stately fabric which tJiey cannot over- 
loJielmf " 

C. — " You make me anxious to hear your clerical 
friend : his sentiments appear to be in strict accordance 
with what I recognize as the theory of legitimate 
churchmanship — the love of our Church primarily as 
the uncompromising Expositor of Truth; secondarily, 
because bequeathed to us — like the inestimable Hope 
of Glory — at the price of agony and blood. The wise 
* Disce Mori. Sutton. 



90 CHAPTER IT. 

man preserves with solicitude the costly purchase 
of a prudent ancestor ; and the unlettered poor regard, 
religiously as penates, the heir -looms of sires who 
sleep. The Protestant Church descends to us as a 
legacy which inherent worth enriches and historic 
associations sanctify; and Montgomery, in praising 
the great of Britain, expresses our feelings for the 
valiant who raised and defended her best bulwark : 

' Their deeds of old renown inspire 
Our bosom with our fathers' fire; 
A proud inheritance we claim 
In all their sufferings, all their fame.' 

And now our Church resembles, morally, a luminary 
radiated by all hallowing influences — influences which 
will not expire while the elements of our present 
nature constitute man. For, amid the incessant tumult 
of sectarianism, unperverted by sophistry, unmoved 
by scorn, the heart which values a steadfast anchor for 
its faith, will render its ready tribute of admiration to 
the fortitude that wrought it ; and with the reverence 
which from a child he is taught to yield to Wisdom,, 
will the man blend the veneration he instinctively 
owns to Antiquity. To me it is cheering to perceive,, 
on all sides, an endeavour in the clergy generally to 
rivet the links which attach the English Churchman 
to the ancestral altar, by appealing to feelings 
" Essential and eternal in the heart:' 



COLLOQUY II. 91 

an earnest striving to quicken a soul in the cold habit 
of modern conformity ; to strengthen present decrepi- 
tude by illustrations of primitive vigour ; to fetter us 
by the gentle aid of Fancy^ as well as by the stirring 
representations of Reality; and, by poetic pictures of 
past attachment, 

' Leaving that beautiful which still was so, 
And making that which was not, till the shrine 
Becomes religion, and the heart runs o'er 
With silent worship. * * The dead still rule 
Our spirits from their urns.'* " 

R — " If that be the character of your churchman- 
ship, Mr. F. is your pulpit-champion; and in the 
Ecclesiastical Armoury of Wordsworth might you 
have found a cartel, in terms entrancing as the strains 
of Circe and the Syrens : 

' More sweet than odours caught by him who sails 

Near spicy shores of Araby the blest, 

A thousand times more exquisitely sweet 

The freight of holy feeling which we meet. 

In thoughtful moments, wafted by the gales 

From fields where good men walk, or bowers wherein they rest.' 

But I am guilty of a kindred superstition. I remember 
part of an ex cathedra exhortation to fidelity to holy 
Mother, made by F. during the voluntary system 
struggle, and delivered from the pulpit because 'he 
believed it due from him to warn his people against 
* Manfred. Byron, 



9S CHAPTER IV. 

the craft and malice of designing men, and could 
not hope for the opportunity of doing so ft:om another 
place.' I might justly say of F. that 

' Surely never did there live on earth 
A man of kindlier nature;' 

and it is not in the power of ordinary provocations to 

' stir the constant mood of his calm thoughts, 
Or put them into misbecoming plight:' 

but of the pressure of threescore years the priest 
seems utterly unconscious when his feelings are 
quickly touched; and at that period of hubbub about 
religious equality, the good man waxed warmer with 
indignation than I had ever or have ever seen him : — 
for he is well read in man; and the rancorous 
enmity which bound in brief alliance an incongruous 
phalanx, using Conscience for its watchword, and 
trampling upon Consistencij , excited his animadversion 
and disgust. So it was not in ' a well-bred whisper' 
that he reminded his parishioners of their privileges 
and responsibilities. After manifesting the injustice 
which the conscientiously-insphed were perspiring 
to promote, he adverted to the sleepless spirit of 
antagonism to the Establishment, and said, 

" ' It becomes your duty, my brethren, to emulate 
the adversaries' activity, deprived of its acerbity. 
Qur Church is calumniated to the very corners of the 



COLLOQUY II. 93 

land by a host of vindictive assailants, whose familiar 
theme is the vituperation of the established order of 
things, and who, in the face of their system's poverty 
and nakedness, avouch vociferously that it is ^rich, 
and increased with goods, and has need of nothing.' 
And now are we summoned to preserve from the 
desecration of the profane and the intermeddling of 
the equivocally-pious, the Casket of Christian Truths 
the consecrated Repository of our Religion, the Land- 
mark for our souls' guidance — the setting up of which 
was so holy an enterprise with our fathers, that the 
soil in which this landmark was enfixed might almost 
be said to have been soddened by the crimson gush- 
ings of their life-blood. And the Virgin Daughter 
which they alienated from a Mother to whose prin- 
ciples their consciences could not conform, and whom 
corrupt men had moreover sullied, has, in process of 
time, herself acquu'ed the sanctity of maternity ; and 
in this present day, amid persecution and defamation, 
are we appealed to as sons, to whom a consciousness 
of filial responsibility and a sentiment of filial afiection 
are not considered foreign. That nursing Mother to 
whose arms we were carried for her baptismal bene- 
diction, and who will receive us again to her bosom 
when we rest from our labors, demands of us. Is a 
Parent's defence in a gainsaying age no part of the 
duty of her children? Guarding us from the awful 



94 CHAPTER IV. 

peril of Infidelity, from the difficulties and bewilder- 
ments of Dissent, from the solitariness of Schism, 
from the slavery of Superstition, and, by the pure 
light of Truth, guiding our feet into the way of Peace, 
is there no emotion of gratitude in our hearts, prompt- 
ing us to rally round her standard, and vigorously 
contend for the Faith once delivered to the Saints ? 
That noble army of martyrs, to whom life was less 
dear than her integrity, calls us to the contest. That 
great Head of the Church, whose earthly prayer it 
was, and whose heavenly will it is, that His may be 
one in Him, even as He is one with the Father, — He 
too summons us to maintain, as a quality inviolate, 
the unity of His church on earth. Breathing the 
very prayers of saints in successive generations ga- 
thered into rest — in these pathways of the spirit 
tracing their very footsteps — and thus connecting 
ourselves with the long line of the faithful, is it our 
lethargy which shall conspire to deliver the Church 
into the hands of her enemies, who, dead to the 
bleeding sorrow wherewith Piety contemplates sacri- 
lege, would glory and not grieve ' to see her in the 
dust;' — enemies, too, puny in consistent ranks, but 
strenghtened now for a fleeting hour by most un- 
principled confederacy; — and it is ours to behold 
and to repel the Voluntary System, which, like a 
huge battering-ram, is levelled at the Fortress of our 



COLLOQUY II. 95 

Faith, from the Babel of belief, by a motley army, in 
the concentrated violence of a thousand conflicting 
animosities !' " 

C. — " Tempora mtitantur! Such a change has 
come o'er the spirit of the nation's dream, that the 
present prostration of the antagonistic party seems 
irreconcileable with the late vaunt of invincibility; 
and in the lull of the tempest we look about us for 
the noisy groupes, rushing to invoke K.eligious Liberty, 
a guardian genius in her rightful lineaments, but at 
that time ' followed, flattered, sought, and sued,' as 

' A reeling^ goddess with a zoneless waist.' 

Like the Indian at his early home, inqiiiring for the 
friends of his youth, we ask after the sectarian chiefs, 
' Where are they? and Echo answers, TVhere?' " 

J^. — " Woe betide this bonny isle of Britain and 
her manifold dependencies if words had oftener been 
deeds !* There were many, however, in that alliance, 
in whom the madness of hostility blinded better 
judgment; for, in a moral war, which that essentially 
should have been, they had not else rejected Prin- 
ciple, which is moral strength, in favor of Union, 
which is physical. I have no sympathy whatever 
with sectarianism; and the sects which are for ever 
subdividing Christendom at the impulse of graceless 
* ' Words are no deeds,' — Henry viii. Shakspeare. 



96 CHAPTER IV. 

ambition or pragmatical whim, and recklessly rending 
the mantle of Christianity, which its Founder would 
have seamless and entire, — these mushroom corps 
attest in how little regard is held the sin of schism. 
StUl, I do not think the dissenters of the Equality- 
epoch went voluntarily into the rough arms of Repub- 
licanism or received willingly the traitor-kiss of E.ome ; 
rather, that they became unwitting instruments of the 
furious demagogue and wily zealot, and could not 
discern with how despicable a company they were 
fellow-workers ; or if they did recognize their true 
position, the near prospect of a large concession, made 
compulsory by numbers, was too tempting to turn the 
back upon, at the recommendation of Rectitude. — 
When I think of that hapless wallowing in defilement, 
and that Puritanism, blindfolded and urged on by 
the designing, should have thus rashly immersed itself 
in pitch and pollution, I feel (as gentle Edmund* 
felt for beauty in tribulation,) that ' all for pity I 
could die.' The avowedly-religious began the contest 
with the elements of moral warfare, — with argument, 
and plea, and the protestations of Conscience (grown 
pitiably petulant, by-the-way, in its degeneracy !) ; but 
' evil communications corrupt,' you know; and after the 
exhaustion of their argumentative ammunition, which 
flashed and did no more, they resorted to expedients 
* Faory Queene, canto iii. 1, 



COLLOQUY II. 97 

wliich^ severely weighed, would long expose them to 
honest scorn; but, regarded compassionately, suggest 
merely a comparison with the '^ little angers' of way- 
ward urchins, who, annoyed by a robuster youth, and 
vexed with the feeling of inferiority, will wreak their 
harmless ire in hasty verbiage, and hurl promiscuous 
missiles at him they cannot reach." 

C. — " '^ Yonder harlot, throned on the seven hills,' 
must have ' coined her cheek to smiles' at the co- 
operation of the children of the conventicle, some of 
whose more fastidious fathers repudiated and rejected 
the reformed Church, because of an alleged remaining 
taint of Popery. Rome could not but have waxed 
complacent at the evidence of docility where, of yore, 
was loud and deep defiance. I firmly believe that a 
strong (if not the strongest) general check experienced 
by the movers of that sectarian sedition was the result 
of a conviction pressed upon the public mind, that 
the continued strife for equalization Avould ultimately 
tend to promote the designs of never-dormant Rome. 
The doctrine of equalization, either civil or rehgious, 
is known by Englishmen to involve an absurd con- 
stitutional anomaly; and though our countrymen are 
' liable to have their understandings played upon by 
unmeaning terms,'* yet, once convinced of error or 
fatuity, they are much too sensible to persevere in the 
* Palcy. 



98 CHAPTER IV. 

' strenuous idleness' of a chase after chimeras. To 
those who looked forward — who saw events in their 
causes and could ascertain contingencies* — the issue 
of a successful league against the Establishment pre- 
sented itself in the disturbed guise of a temporary- 
religious republic, in which energies whose proper 
direction should be dictated by Religion, might be 
seen rapt in the zeal of partizanship and restless 
struggle for pre-eminency. And in this fever of 
aspiring sectaries, it was easy to foresee the stealthy 
form of Popery, with its ready bait, false wile, and 
specious reasoning, winning its unsuspected way over 
minds too jealous of surrounding competitors to detect 
the not-unpalatable poison of the dissembling Phy- 
sician, or to scrutinize the artful artillery wherewith 
the citadel of Belief is frequently besieged, — a siege 
so cunningly contrived and conducted, that the pro- 
selyte's surrender is often startling to himself, and 
seemingly unreal as ' a phantasma or a dream.' " 

E. — " You have alluded to the Church of Rome as 
to a spiritual physician. In palmier days she was, 
in that capacity, most accommodating in her dispen- 
sary, and considerate in her c^u-es: but she insisted 
on the patient's faith in her all-sufficiency, and vwtue 
went not out from her where this credulity was wanting. 
Por the rest, she had soul-salves at all prices — the 
* Johnson. 



COLLOQUY II. 99 

costliest, of course, the most mollifying; and herbs 
in infinite variety — the bitter for the ascetic and the 
destitute, and sweeter-savoured for the rich devotion- 
less. And in the matter of preparing for an easy 
purgatorial probation, the standing prescription in 
her pharmacopoeia was — The needy, lacerate; the 
wealthy, pay. This was her mode of treatment in 
the olden time, when men had lost sight of Freedom 
and were reconciled to their bonds; ere any mind 
enslaved had risen up, resolved to burst the manacles 
which bound it; and ere those who subsequently 
spake their abhorrence of chicanery so deadly in its 
consequences, had provided holier healing for human 
maladies, ' purged the general weal,' and ' cleansed 
the stuifed bosom of that perilous stuff' which had 
sapped the sord's vitals, eclipsed the divine penetration 
of its eye, and degraded the thoughtful allegiance 
of reason to a spiritless and automatic routine. A 
daring sway, that Church of Rome's ! a di'ead respon- 
sibility, that of her representatives!" 

C. — " Dread, indeed, is the accusation against her; 
for her guilt has not been the simple concealment of 
truths divine, she has distorted and deformed them; 
fi-om the lighthouse to which men's souls looked for 
a pure religious ray upon the path of their pilgrimage, 
she suspended a deceptive beacon: her government 
was a mystery of iniquity; her ceremonies were an 



100 CHAPTER IV. 

empty pageant; her calendar became a populous 
mythology ; her overthrow was a recovery of sight to 
the blind!" 

E. — " Apprehensive episcopalians are of opinion 
that the Papacy has agents in the protestant priest- 
hood; — that the upas-tree has taken root here, at 
home, and is spreading far and wide its baneful in- 
fluence. In short, those who boast of seeing very 
clearly indeed down the vista of futurity, distinguish 
dreadful things : — ^honest protestant churchmen aghast 
at the expose of secretly-spreading differences; our 
dear old Mother in dismay at the desertion of her 
surpliced servants; and pseudo-protestant clergymen 
wrangling for precedency in saluting the Pope's toe ! 
It is quite consoling to reflect, that predictions in our 
day are not invariably infallible." 

C. — " Society is never without a morbid company 
of members who are ever busy in making troubles, 
independently of those they were born to, and whose 
life is a continued ' ague-fit of fear.'* To them ' of 
comfort no man speak,' rather ' of graves, of worms, 
and epitaphs,' — " 

E. — " Monomaniacal forestallers of grief, who insist 

that msufiicient for the day is the evil thereof; are 

over-exquisite in casting 'the fashion of uncertain 

evils ;'t and receive 'comfort like cold porridge.' J 

* Richard ii. Shakspeare. f Comus. X Tempest, act ii. 1. 



COLLOQUY II. 101 

'Tis lamentable that in despite of ' saint, sage, and 
sophist/ and the painful schooling of Experience, the 
votaries and victims of ' squint Suspicion' are so many. 
— But you were observing that — " 

C. — " These, if they discern or fancy they discern a 
cloud on the horizon's verge, though it be no bigger 
than a man's hand, foretel a certain and an immediate 
covering of the entire firmament. Nay, there are 
minds so strangely constituted, that they will peer 
many times (if necessary) into the dim distance, in 
quest of that shadowy omen at which, having seen, 
they profess to ' sorrow as men without hope.' The 
force of prejudice is immense ; and ' he who would 
leap over the hedges of custom had need be well 
mounted.'* It is Prejudice which views unwillingly 
the movement going on in the Church — a movement 
almost entirely defensible by the churchman's charter, 
the Book of Common Prayer, and yet inveighed 
against as a symptom fraught with danger. Supple- 
mentary and whimsical appendages to the jJi'escribed 
Order, may be condemnable, especially if adjuncts to 
ceremonies themselves non-essential and sometime 
disused. Of the thousand tongues of E-umour many 
are set in agitation by ultra-finical precisians; but 
many others are murmuring over a revival most com- 
mendable. Against the prejudices of late and present 
* Aaron Hill. 



102 CHAPTER IV. 

times one miglit almost as well expect favour for 
Lucifer as for Laud; yet Laud must not be mistaken 
into vice,* or be condemned and dismissed unlieard. 
' Ever since I came in place/ lie said, at the bar of 
tlie house of peers, ' I have laboured nothing more 
than that the external publick worship of God, so 
much slighted in divers parts of this kingdom, might 
be preserved, and that with as much decency and 
uniformity as might be. For I evidently saw that 
the public neglect of God's service in the outward 
face of it, and the nasty lying of many places dedicated 
to that service, had almost cast a damp upon the true 
and inward worship of God, which, while we live in 
the body, needs external helps, and all little enough 
to keep it any vigour.' 

E. — " The eifort was indisputably laudable; — upon 
the judiciousness of its manifestation opinions differ." 

C. — " Those among the clergy who make a. prin- 
ciple of unity, and who most earnestly strive to enable 
the Church ' to realize the daily supervision of her 
children,'t are the most suspected of the priesthood. 
I impute no papistical prepossessions where they are 
vehemently alleged to exist ; and when I meet with 
expressions which the ^ scandalously nice' adduce as 
evidence of treachery, I lament the unguardedness 
of the learned, who frequently excite suspicion in the 
* Essay on Criticism. Pope. f Bishop of Winchester. 



COLLOQUY II. 103 

illiterate^ by apparent more than by actual incon- 
sistencies. The man who is familiar with the history 
of the Reformation, must disapprove in part; but it 
arouses the alarm of the ignorant, to hear that event 
reprobated, with which he has been instructed to 
connect the rescue of ' pure Religion and undefiled' 
from the prison-house of Popery and the dense at- 
mosphere of long-accumulating Error. But assuming 
that favorers of the Popedom — nay, that apostates 
are at this hour subtly striving to re-infuse Romanism 
into the Anglican faith, by what instrumentality would 
their design be most eifectually accomplished ? Would 
it be best promoted by intellectual progression or 
retrogression? Have we of the tiers-etat attained, 
indubitably, an intellectual vantage-ground superior 
to Jesuitical jugglery? — ^might not the sly sybil whine 
into bondage the compliant multitude? The old 
appliances of persecution and the anathema seem but 
little calculated for a modern taming process.'''' 

E. — " Why, as to the mind's retrograde movement 
the old lady in scarlet and her shaven sons would 
have firstly to close the flood-gates of Literature ; and 
those literary ushers-in and whippers-in, the book- 
publishers, could, 'ere a man might say, Behold!' 
whistle together a tolerably deep-mouthed opposition. 
The meridian might of depraved Rome was co-existent 
with the midnight of the intellect; — it was over slaves^ 



104 CHAPTER IV. 

groping slaves, that she held the most arbitrary sway. 
There is not a layman in England who would more 
strenuously advocate a proper docility to the Church 
than would I; yet, I say it solemnly, may God forbid 
our relapsing again into a state of mental prosternation, 
in the imbecility of which it is impossible that He 
can take pleasure. You mention casuistry and per- 
secution among the instruments which, in an impro- 
bable case, the popish priesthood might put in opera- 
tion. When dissenters — who are never guilty of 
obstinate adherence, tractable lambs ! — when tlieij meet 
humble men of the Isaac Ashford* stamp, who are 
determined to walk in the ' sober light' of the Church, 
their designation of such character is higot. Now 
with such an innate bigotry towards protestantism 
our countrymen are, I believe, too deeply imbued, to 
imbibe venom while, from the great Halls of spiritual 
Medicine, there issue so many keen discriminators 
and denouncers of what is base and surreptitious. 
Then as to persecution — it is a system of policy as 
cruel in its operation as it is eventually fatal to the 
cause which it is intended to serve. Its very inter- 
ference in the promotion of theological unity is a 
sufficient condemnation of the tenets it would advance; 
and yet in this particular field of contention, its exer- 
cise has been at once more sanguinary and self- 
* The Parish Register. Crabbe. 



COLLOQUY II. 105 

destructive than in any other sphere. It is an equivocal 
instrument in the business of salvation, which slays 
the body because the soul refuses to be saved in the 
manner prescribed; as he would be considered a 
dangerous physician, who should overcome the im- 
bibitions scruples of his patient by the administration 
of a lasting quietus. The swords of the magistrate 
and of the minister are of a contrary temperament : — ■ 
allegiance to spiritual authority, enforced by civil 
power, may possibly be made to assume the semblance 
of ^ peace — but there is no peace.' If we ask. What 
h.a.s force effected for (avowedly) a spiritual Religion, 
we find a reply in the defeat of the system : and this 
result was inevitable ; for Barbarism can never be the 
divinely-accredited representative of Benignity, and 
a process at which our human nature shudders, is 
little calculated to reconcile our divine. And if we 
seek to justify the cruelty of the agents by the con- 
tents of their credential, we find the Potentate's 
command — ' Put up thy sword into the sheath!' and 
this rebuke of violence to him whose mantle has been 
clauned as the vest of spiritual supremacy, and whose 
weapon, in the unrestrained hands of his successors, 
has since deluged Christendom with gore, in glory 
of the Restorer of Malchus !" 

C. — " Aye, the records of Rome are too indelibly 
stained with characters which have but one expressive 



106 CHAPTEfl IV. 

meaning through all time, to make the enlargement 
of her sheep-fold a welcome sight to the world. — 
May Heaven preserve mankind from her maternal 
mercies! The effect of distance is to diminish mag- 
nitude ; and now, in the calm adoption of any creed 
or tenet, we are forgetful of the fiery trials of faith, 
when absolute conformity was enforced by torture. 
Looking back upon this or that crowded scene with 
an eye which a lack of interest enervates or inter- 
mediate objects divert, our sight is beclouded and 
dim; but let us preserve a special focus and a steady 
gaze, and our emotions of awe and horror become as 
vivid in the distant retrospection of these atrocities, 
as were theirs who had them in immediate review." 

E. — " The places which should have illumined 
the benighted, were themselves sitting in darkness; 
the declared home of Christianity — which can never 
exist apart from Charity, Commiseration, and Mercy 
— became an ' habitation of Cruelty;' and 

' Victory sickened, ignorant vvliere to rest.'* 

Upon human tenderness the tale of her terrible 
triumphs falls freezingly — it acts like ice upon the 
heart. In a little book, brought to me by my god- 
daughter many months ago — the Nun, was it not, 
Mary? — illustrative of that serious mistake, a monastic 
* Wordsworth. 



COLLOQUY II. 107 

life, there occurs a, recital of the discipline resorted 
to in the case of two sisters, whom the powers of 
darkness had influenced to assert the transcendental 
authority of scripture over tradition. The narrative 
is related by one of the victims, and is invested, in 
many of its details of suflering, with an air of unre- 
pining sufferance and meekness, truly pathetic. — 
No exaggeration of inflictions, nor show of super- 
natural endurance, nor sickly suppliance for sympathy, 
but a dispassionate revelation, bearing on its surface 
and in its secrets the impress of authenticity. A 
picture which cannot have failed to excite holy pity, 
is that wherein the exiled nuns are represented in 
a cell, lit by a sad and solitary lamp, and — saving 
the Presence wliich no barriers may exclude — are 
visited only by a spectral female attendant, cold as 
if carved from alabaster. One is bowed with the 
weight of years and the tyrannies of the holy Mother, 
and is in sickness, and not far from the strange bosom 
of Mercy; the other is occupied in administering 
solace from a purer source than the fountains of 
traditionary record; and over her dungeon-divinity 
time elapses unheeded and unknown : 

' Seasons return, but not to tliem returns 
Day or the sweet approach of even or morn.' 

This loneliness, and ignorance of day and night. 



108 CHAPTER IV. 

suggest an idea of desolation, which, if not divinely 
redeemed from despair, would thrill through every 
feeling, as the type of Innocency in eternal abandon- 
ment : as it is, Humanity, incredulous, inquires if such 
recited cruelties can ever have been realized by sen- 
tient beings, and they, too, of the finer-fibred creation ! 
Oh, if the accents of oppression ascend from the 
prisons of the bound, and if every wrong has its 
regarded complaint and its revenge, how fearful a 
retribution must be in reserve for these enormities ; 
— perpetrated, too, by zealots, whose stony seclusion 
could not shut out the worst part of their nature, while 
it often perverted the best; and whom the incentive 
of an oifended superstition did sometimes transform 
to furies — in furtherance of the Christian ymVA/" 

C. — " It is not the least of many and great privi- 
leges peculiar to the age in which we Kve, that 
dread no longer interferes in exercises spiritual; that 
the scruples of Conscience are respected; and innu- 
merable vagaries, which it would be difficult to affiliate 
to Conscience, are tolerated on the mere assumption 
of that honored but hacknied patronymic. But this 
privilege of exemption from dread, in which all 
classes may and do participate, operates, I apprehend, 
but feebly, as a stimulant to general thankfulness. 
The episcopalian portion of the community are de- 
ficient in this feeling, and ' see no beauty, that they 



COLLOQUY II. 109 

should desire' their Churchy, for her tolerancy to the 
turbulent, and for that soothing strain of hope, which 
refuses to ' shut the gates of Mercy/ where more 
denunciatory creeds would, sometimes savagely, en- 
throne Despair* As it regards the non-conforming 
body, it is not easy to conceive that thankfulness could 
very keenly exist in connection with the ubiquity of 
scruple and morbid sensitiveness of conscience which 
prevailed of late. The immunities permitted to sec- 
tarianism by the conciliatory spirit of past ages, and 
rightly esteemed by their immediate recipients as 
privileges, are declared by their enlightened successors 
to be mockeries — partial ameliorations serving only 
to render all restraint intolerable. A little while ago 
how many religious malecontents made it their un- 
pleasing occupation to invent fictitious grievances, 
tuning their imagination to the sighs of capti-vdty and 
the sound of chains." — 

E. — " Not hoisting the red cap of revolution or the 
mitred cap episcopal, on a pole chequered with sixteen 
hundred isms, but an ' old hat, with the humour of 
forty times forty fancies prick't in't.' f — A dull trope, 
this, and interruptive ; but Will must have his way." 

C. — " The blaze of modern liberaHsm confuses 
old-established ideas of freedom, and manifests that 

* In allusion to the service for the Burial of the Dead. 
t Taming of the Shrew, act iil. 2. 



110 CHAPTER IV. 

to be tyranny, whicli not long since was toleration. 
They who had been accustomed to regard Conscience 
as the inflexible reprover of moral obliquity, were 
bewildered at the contrariety of its developments. 
In the dissentient religious world, (with one honorable 
exception,) the strife had ceased to be for correctness 
of creeds — the absorbing aim was closeness of con- 
federacy ; and advancing into the political boundary, 
(it was a ' narrow bank' and scarcely perceptible that 
separated the two spheres,) the lamb of spiritual 
meekness and the lion of avowed republicanism might 
be seen in most affectionate salutation. The war-cry 
of the heterogeneous host has, however, died away 
in the distance; and to the defeated and dispersed 
tribes is left the sorry — and, let us hope, the salutary 
reminiscence, of an inglorious and 

' Vaulting ambition, whicii o'erleapt itself.' " 

" Whatever," said E. with much seriousness, "may 
be the defalcation of others' gratitude for the peace 
which now attends the outward practice of Religion, 
our duty is clear. Although by casual discussion 
frequently entrame, it does not agreeably consort with 
my disposition, to recur to scenes in human history in 
which the actors have played unseemly parts; but I 
derive the charm of music from the story of good deeds. 
You, who have sternly reprehended the indiscriminate 



COLLOQUY II. Ill 

enlistment and chameleon-livery of Conscience, would 
frown, were I to arrogate her sacred sanction to an 
objection I entertain against entering, myself, into 
the survey and the scrutiny of depraved human 
character. I would hardly dare to dignify this ob- 
jection by the designation of ' conscientious;' but it is 
nevertheless strengthened by grave admonitions, ad- 
dressed to ' Reason's ear ;' and I fortify it by this 
' Keflexion Morale' of ]\Iadanie Deshoulieres : 

' Toujours vains, toujours faux, toujours pleins d'injustices, 

Nous crions dans tous nos discours 
Centre les passions, les foiblesses, les vices, 

Ou nous succombons tous les jours.' 

I have often thought upon a saying of Horace Wal- 
pole age, reverting to a design of Horace Walpole 
jeune : — it not only illustrates aptly, but touchingly, 
the sharp and summary judgment of character which 
the young form; — the calm and clement adjudication 
of the old. ' In my youth,' he says, ' I thought of 
writing a satire on mankind; but now, in my age, I 
think I should write an apology for them. Several 
worthy men, whom I know, fall into such unexpected 
situations, that to me, who know these situations, their 
conduct is matter of compassion and not of blame.' 
Besides, conscious of our passions and their propen- 
sities, we plunge into a position we should avoid, in 



112 CHAPTER lY. 

arraigning before ourselves our fellow-men, vile tliough. 
tliey be : the poor culprit, Mr. C, is wont so eagerly 
to usurp tbe judgment-seat, and— an outlawed criminal 
himself — proceeds as with clean bands to accuse and 
to condemn! 

* And what were we, frail creatures as we are, 
If the All-merciful should mete to us 
With the same rigorous measure wherewithal 
Sinner to sinner metes?' 

" 0, Charity ! " continued the rapt Elder, with still 
devouter earnestness and abstraction, " 0, Charity! 
thou maiden whose chiefest majesty is in thy meek- 
ness, who shrinkest from sapphire thrones to j)reside 
at the hearths of the humble, and that art the 
herald of all heavenly things! — Celestial Visitant, 
whose proudest banner is the palm, and whose richest 
trophy is peace ! — thou that wert the first-born of the 
children of Eternal Love, and that art the joy of 
seraphs and the spirits of the saints; that keepest 
concord among the harps of the angel-band, and from 
' the high and holy place' speakest Peace to the sons 
of men! — fair Child of our Father, God, how frail 
a temple hast thou in our froward hearts! When, 
O pure Spirit, when shall that sterile soil become 
luxuriant with fruits of thy planting? How long 
shall we boast that thou hast made thy home in our 



COLLOQUY II. 113 

breast, and that thou hast therein an altar which is 
inviolate, and that we are at one with the vast family 
of the flesh, and yet so oft awaken to a contest that 
comes not from thy dwelling, and passions that cannot 
have kindled in tliy sanctuary, and dark distrustfulness 
not born of thee, which tell us bodingly that thou, 
white-mantled Maid! art not the habitant of our 
troubled sphere, but art still a stranger to our fallen 
race. Thou hast tuned thy lyre at the eternal fount, 
and glorified thy song with glad tidings ; but when 
shall thy feet be beautiful upon the mountains, that 
we may view thy vesture, and know thee from the 
phantom we now vainly clasp, by the deep unsullied 
love that shall have found a dwelling-place within us ?" 



COLLOQUY III. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 

" Death makes no conquest of this Conqueror; 
For now he lives in fame, though not in life." 
Julius CcBsar. — Shakspeake. 

Having attained this stage of intimacy and confidence 
with the tenant of Ivy Lodge, I thenceforth made a 
weekly pilgrimage thither, with admirable regularity. 
A lawyer's protestation of disinterestedness is so often 
considered and treated as a matter of levity, that I 
have long since declined protesting by it ; and do not, 
therefore, assert for the steady constancy of my move- 
ments that charm which inflexible self-devotion derives 
from the evident absence of self-interest. Were I not 
constrained by the consciousness, that a complaint 
urged by so impotent a limb as am I, against that 
gross moral injustice (unfortunately not an indictable 
ofience,) which the legal body sustains, in the ceaseless 
suspicion which attaches to the actions and assevera- 
tions of so overwhelming a majority of its members, 



116 CHAPTER V. 

I would certainly labor hard to blow tlie cruel douht 
in every censorious and contumelious eye, till the 
pains and ]Denalties of ophthalmia should have wrought 
remorse. The moral mischief which has been done by 
"squint Suspicion" is incalculable; and the chronicles 
of the law would, probably, demonstrate its amount 
more amply and more accurately than those of any 
other profession not under the immediate cognizance 
of the police. Faculties cannot be borne for ever 
meekly, where to the frail bearer is always imputed 
a brow of bronze; nor can clearness in office preserve 
its immaculacy, exposed to the perpetual stigma of 
collusion. I have been a regretful witness to repeated 
proofs, that virtue frecpiently mistaken for vice, has 
been vitiated; and I know members of the profession 
who, had fine feeling not been rendered callous by 
indiscriminate sinister accusations, might even to this 
day have held it as cordra honos snores to come de- 
signedly in contact with a quiet country gentleman's 
dinner-table; and tax him, a non-inviting host, for a 
passing opinion, proffered en mangeant. 

I merely hint, currente calamo, at the injustice of 
including the innocent and guilty in one sweeping 
verdict, and leave it with the lord chancellor, ad 
referendum ; trusting that, after a careful investigation 
of cause and eifect, a corrective measure may a]3pear 
feasible, and be announced with the next law -reforms. 



CHAPTEK Y. 117 

My Ivy Lodge days were marked with white stones ; 
oh! very happy were those hebdomadal hours. Four 
or five summer evenings had I wandered about the 
precincts of the EhTer's tranquil abode, listening at 
times to panegyric, for which a thousand objects in 
his path supplied him with as many themes. The 
effervescence of a thankful heart is always euphonious, 
but old age wondrously mellows its effect, and E. 
loolied the gratitude he spake; his was no rotatory 
or conventional phraseology, no " goodly outside" to 
vacuity, no odious nasal twang signifying nothing, 
but an incontrollable effusion emanating from the glad 
perception of " good in every thing." Of continuous 
colloquy we had little, or if he " talked the flowing 
hour," I was distrait: — under " skiey influences," the 
luscious Summer pleaded for so large a portion of the 
eye and ear, that garrulity, nathless its eloquence, 
was outrivalled; and it was a more delightful task to 
emulate feminine eulogy, pronounced upon a favorite 
flower, than to extend a patient hearing to senescence, 
although enthusiastic. And when came Night's dewy 
reminder that the fair world was subject to vapours 
and its inhabitants to consumption, then, within doors, 
I arrested the commencing Elder upon his own con- 
fession, that " Poetry, however sublime, was never 
so effective alone, as when wedded to Music;" so the 
Godfather resigned himself, in listening attitude, to 



118 CHAPTER V. 

the lich, feeling melodies of Mrs. Hemans — concords 
of sweet sound entrancing to " old men and children," 
but very dangerous to " young men and maidens" 
pledged to the principle of celibatic independence. 
And five nights — such nights as make me think the 
" faithful witness" in her dotage now, and the lesser 
lights degenerating — five oriental nights had mantled, 
firstly with carmine caught from the sun's adieu, and 
then with the pale hue borrowed from the pensive 
moon, that quiet umbrageous retirement, and the 
Old Man's voice had been subdominant; — heard 
now and then, in rapturous comment, in the lull of 
strains sweet as if wafted over violet-beds, but very 
variously burdened, — now hopeful, now despondent, 
— as the theme of song had sprung forth in bright 
sunshine of soul, or in its sombrous shadow. 

In this transitory condition, however, we know that 
^^ nought is lasting;" and mankind are pretty well 
agreed that enjoyment is lamentably short-lived: — 
the converse state is not so ephemeral; indeed, there 
is a distressing disproportion between the time to 
laugh and the time to mourn. E. seemed strongly 
of opinion that there was a season for talking as well 
as a season for singing, and on the sixth evening 
his countenance decidedly portended discussion. A 
portly volume of Shakspeare was lying open upon 
the table, implying recent perusal of the Winter's 



CHAPTEK V. 119 

Tale : the book had been a costly copy of the Poet, 
and the evidence of a broken back and innumerable 
scraps of paper projecting irregularly from its margins^ 
made it questionable if, in the Elder's library, it 
were an equal sinecurist with its supporting-shelf. 
Notwithstanding the fealty which every English man 
and woman owes to Shakspeare, I would, just then, 
have declined paying prosaic tribute to any one, 
(always excepting our E.oyal Mistress, the Queen, 
upon whom may Heaven ever smile!) and would 
have still said, 

" Let rich music's tongue 
Unfold imagined happiness;"* 

but there was a deliberate purpose in the Elder's 
manner which forbade remonstrance ; and looking at 
and listening to the earnest Ancient, I became quickly 
reconciled. Would, only, that I could do his style 
and manner greater justice. 

The Elder, extolling incidentally the exhaustless 
mines of poetic wealth which modern publication has 
compressed in waistcoat-pocket editions of Shakspeare 
and Milton, adverted to the master-minds themselves : 

E. — " I would shrink abashed from a supposed 
critical stricture on the works of Shakspeare and 
Milton; for, making no pretension to a correct judg- 
* Romeo and Juliet, act ii. G. 



120 CHAPTER V. 

ment, and valuing wliatcver yields mc profitable plea- 
sure or leads to the knowledge of myself, fifty years of 
admiration of what I approve as ' good,' have left me 
neither leisure nor inclination to * argue much of evil.' 
But to my uninstructed eye their appears a pervading 
characteristic in the productions of each of these 
illustrious minds, wherein (despite occasional aber- 
rancy) we recognize Shakspeare as to this world its 
proper oracle, and Milton as the oracle of other worlds 
to this. The one, in his delineation of men, seems to 
have ascended on an eagle's wing, and with stronger 
than an eagle's eye, to have scanned the mazy line 
of human character to its utmost verge, touching, in 
its remote extremes, the angels who keep and those 
who kept not their first estate : — the other, aiming at 
things unattempted,' and advancing into spheres 
untrodden, appears to have sped upon the pinions of 
a spirit to the centre of the Triune council, and shared 
in the secrets of the Eternal. Shakspeare unveils 
the home of passion in man, and depicts its every 
gradation, from the depths of the terrible and the 
vile, to the eminence of the tender and virtuous : — 
Milton assumes a similar sovereignty over spiritual 
Avorlds, from the profoundest conclave of the apostate, 
to the sublimest concourse of the adoring ; in awful 
ubiquity, we find him now an accessary to the designs 
of Heaven, and now arevcaler of the dark deliberations 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 121 

of fiends. Neither Shakspeare, in his universe^ nor 
Milton in his, has submitted to Kniits, or confines, or 
demarcation; but each reigns in the infinite. And 
as with their several portraitures of life it was ex- 
pedient to connect the scenery and circumstance of 
its exhibition, therefore the visible creation found a 
master-limner in the one, and the regions of the 
glorified and rebellious in the other: and this traceiy 
of subordinate objects illustrates admirably in one 
case the varied loveliness of the seen; and, in the 
other, harmonizes with the imagined grandeur of the 
invisible." 

C. — " Around the brow of the most popular of that 
exalted Two, how strenuous and spreading is the 
disposition to weave fresh laurel !" 

E. — " True; and that, too, contemporary with the 
decadence of the represented drama. The Poet's 
conceptions come not now, or rarely come, ' bodied 
forth' in eloquent personification; and the Poet's 
page is the almost-exclusive mirror which reflects his 
greatness. Yet therein lies a magnetic influence 
preventing in us the decay of admiration, and, like 
medicine of indestructible virtue, retaining its pro- 
perties ' in every clime, and travel where we may ;' 
for now are the isles afar allying themselves in con- 
fraternity with the islanders at home, to sempiternalize 
the name and fame of Shakspeare ! Nor must there 



122 CHAPTER V. 

be a withered leaf in that Man's coronal, while the 

earth has a green tree or living flower upon its 

surface, and a living hand to cherish and redeck the 

chaplet !" 

C — " The ejaculation of Hamlet iipon his poisoned 

sire, 

' Take him for all in all, 

I shall not look upon his like again,' 

is now become of every-day appropriation, and is 
not therefore any longer the especial elegy of departed 
eminence. But may it not with singular propriety be 
applied to its author? — in emphatic identification vdth 
this Poet peculiarly, can we hope to ' look upon his 
like again?' " 

E. — " If of this ' brief candle,' mortal life, the 
' better part be burnt out,' * probability might oppose 
the advent of a Shakspeare secundus ; but that same 
Nature, who ' hath framed strange fellows in her 
time,'t endows no man with authority to predicate 
the character of her future achievements. However, 
' no perfection in reversion shall have a praise in 
present,'J and we may diligently devote our praise to 
excellency which our eyes have seen and our hands 
handled. But the beam of assured belief of heaven, 
wherewith the merciful Creator sustains the anxious 



* o 



2 Henry iv. act i. 2. f Merchant of Venice, i. 1. 

:[: Troilus and Cressida, iii. 2. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 12U 

creature, — a beam which shines brightest upon mor- 
tahty's expiring embers, and whose divine consolation 
and guidance cheered the Poet, inspires us also — not 
with the wavering trust of renowned men of old, with 
whom a future life was hypothetical, and whose souls' 
desires for a reunion with seers who had gone before 
were burdened with misgivings — but with the ' sure 
and certain hope' of looking upon himself again, in 
a better country, and under a fairer aspect than that, 
when, 

' Beaten and chopped with tamed antiquity,'* 

William Shakspeare, the mortal, bewailed the marring 
touch of Time." 

C. — " The human heart, which is the ' haunt and 
main region' of every poet's pen, consists of so much 
which, as Wordsworth asserts, is essential to it and 
eternal there, and these inseparable and immutable 
qualities have been so comprehensively and, very 
frequently, so inimitably treated by Shakspeare, that 
Nature, as far as we are able to conceive her capacity 
for illustration, could hardly furnish materials for 
another mind like his, whose empire should be vast, 
and yet natural. In its physiological proportions a 
•contracted sphere, in its spiritual attributes a realm 
* Shakspeare, Poems. 



124: CHAPTER V. 

of undefined dilatability, it might of this moral me- 
tropolis of poets, the heart, be said, 

' a crooked figure may 
Attest, in little place, a million ;'* 

and Shakspeare seems as if by ]Srature chosen and 
commissioned as Delineator General of our race, and 
thus supremely delegated, to have gone forth un- 
dauntedly over the expansive and uneven territory 
of the sentiments and passions of mankind. The 
Poet has often availed himself of auxiliary aid, and 
frequently adventures, vvdth no deceptive self-reliance, 
beyond the boundary of the natural; but tuitliin that 
boundary has he left space for a future Shakspeare ; 
— for one who, like his sovereign self, would be 
* cabinned, cribbed, confined,' in a kind of colony of 
character ; one to whose discursive disposition it would 
be a natural and unconquerable necessity to follow 
in the track of men, wherever Nature dictated ?" 

E. — " Thou art unmindful, O Querist, that Nature, 
of whom thou speakest as in some parts absolute from 
the beginning, is, in other parts, most evanescent. — 
Beveal, I adjure thee, before this, our other auditor, 
after whom it is that well-discerning Will hath, by 
the mouth of Hamlet, designated Frailty ;-\ and then, 
* Henry v. Chorus. 
f " Frailty, thy name is Woman'" Hamlet, act i. 2. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 125 

admire th.e fitness of a feminine appellative for tliat 
volatile Dame, wliom thy imagination clotli mistakenly 
picture as an antique quakeress, clad in unvarying 
russet, fashioned in starched propriety, and vested 
Avith perdurability. Thy device savoureth too much 
of demureness, friend! Believe it, Nature, though 
turned of her six thousandth year, is not a straight- 
laced, crimp-bodiced grandam, of orders grey; — alas 
for manifold goodmen whom it painfully concerneth, 
doth she not, — lacking that staidness which might be 
expected in a mother of millions, — doth she not by 
example countenance, in mothers of vinits and of tens, 
an itching after new apparel? Pardon this levity, 
most grave and reverend Signer, but the excessive 
gravity of your latter interrogation too much o'er- 
tasked my impertm-bability; but know, that with a 
personage ycleped Folly, in a play of Ford,* I might 
truly say, ' I love not any whom I laugh not at : pretty 
strange humour is't not?' and you might properly 
reply, with a certain Raybright, ' To any one that 
knows you not, it is.' You suspect the cajJability 
of Natm-e to furnish illustrative material for another 
Shakspeare, the first having so comprehensively dealt 
with the permanent passions of the mind; yet the 
process of time, which may not materially alter essen- 
tial attributes, continually ditersifies their development; 
* The Sun's Darling-, act i. 1. 



126 CHAPTER V. 

and in the changed aspect we sometimes fail to re- 
cognize the individual. The constituent parts of a 
kaleidoscope are identically the same in each of its 
fortuitous conformations; but the effect of the least 
commotion is manifested by a changed figure. The 
word which more than any other characterizes our 
condition, is progression ; and Coriolanus, when he 
thus accuses a fickle mob, 

' With every minute you do change a mind,'* 

supplies the whole world with a text on instability. 
In these mundane mutations the poets find their 
'occupation;' and perhaps it is matter for rejoicing 
that these mutations are not few or far between, sup- 
posing that Nature were to have always her quiver 
full of minstrel-children: monotony. Sir, must have 
made them warble in a fiat key; things would have 
died in description and looked dusky in song; detail 
must have engendered ennui by disgusting minuteness,. 
Poor Nature herself would have had to endure an 
inquisition, her inquisitors being her own infants ; and 
they being often '^ gravelled for lack of matter,'t the 
old gentlewoman's hairs must, metaphorically, have 
all been numbered. What a weary session would 
impatient man have had, before a faded drop-scene! 
But since our lot is cast where all are at once spec- 
* CorioIanuSj act i. 1. t As You Like it. iv. L 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 127 

tators of and actors in a revolving panorama, tedium 
is not ; and now, exempted from * dropping buckets 
into empty wells,' or giving superfluous coatings to 
previously-painted lilies, ceaseless configurations sup- 
ply fresh, materiel for the Poet, who can with reason 
only murmur when 

' Change grows too changeable — without being new.' 

The fitful Shelley — a * wandering star,' sometimes 
obscure, at others, coruscating with intense brilliancy 
— has written so beautifully on this fertile theme,, 
that I am irresistibly tempted to repeat his lines on 

' MUTABILITY. 

' We are as elouds that veil the midnight moon; 

How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, 
Streaking the darkness radiantly! — yet soon 

Night closes round, and they are lost for ever: 

' Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings 
Give various response to each varying blast. 

To whose frail frame no second motion brings 
One mood or modulation like the last. 

'We rest — A dream has power to poison sleep: 

We rise — one wandering thought pollutes the day:; 

We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep, 
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away: 

' It is the same I — For, be it joy or sorrow. 

The path of its departure still is free : 
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow j 

Nought may endure save Mutability.' 



128 CHAPTER V. 

The last line is a paradox and a proverb. But to 

return to tlie Swan of Avon et a nos moutons : — 

while circumstance changes, character will change, 

and vice versa; and he who is endowed with the 

divine afflatus, will never fruitlessly invoke the Muse 

so long as day by day unprecedented feats, fancies, 

and frailties excite us to exclaim, 

' Can such things be. 
Without our special wonder?'* 

" Midway between the creator and the copyist there 
is a ground which Shakspeare nobly occupies. I mean 
by his creations those of his productions which are 
altogether or chiefly ideal, and by his copies such as 
are representations of individual character ; but it is 
to his art of conformation that I allude as to a central 
ability; — his skill in selecting from the varied soil 
of humanity, portions of clay of various color and 
consistency, but lm7nan nevertheless and therefore 
congruous, and then fabricating these elements into 
man or woman v/ith such facile grace and consum- 
mate verisimilitude, that — the ecstasy of admiration 
having subsided into calm — we ask, with such surprise 
as the knowledge of his measureless power to charm 
permits, 

' What impossible matter will he make easy nextP'f 
C. — " A Quarterly Reviewer has helped us to com- 
* Macbeth, act iii. 5. f Tempest, ii. 1. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 129 

prehend the function to which you allude: he says 
of the mind of Shakspeare, that it was as * a magic 
mirror, in which all human nature's possible forms 
and combinations were present, intuitively and in- 
herently; not conceived, but as connatural portions 
of his OAvn humanity.' " 

E. — " Would it be just — could admiration so con- 
sent to dwarf the attributes of glorious William 
Shakspeare, as to say, that where he did not create, 
he copied? Was it among women, to the extremest 

degree 

' Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,' 

that he found the original of that witching Rosalind ? 
— well, by the way, for the peace of the 'bosoms' 
lords' of all ye gallants under forty, that Rosalinds are 
rarce aves ! Was it after ' a child of our grandmother 
Eve, a female ; or for our more siveet understanding, 
a tooman^* that he drew the wife of Macbeth? But 
apart alike from creation and from conformation, and 
where the Poet may be said to have drawn from a 
definite design supplied by Nature, even here do we 
not involuntarily acknowledge, as our eye is arrested 
at one or other of the master-strokes wherewith his 
pages abound, 

' It is the witness still of excellency !'t" 
C. — " His pages do, indeed, abound with treasures. 

* Love's Labour Lost, act i. 1. t Much Ado about Nothing, ii. 3. 

s 



180 CHAPTER V. 

It is not with. Shakspeare as with others^ illustrious 
in poetic annals, whose beauties are comparatively rare 
and sometimes cumbrously imbedded ; in Shakspeare 
their ' sensible, warm motion,' is everywhere percep- 
tible : we have not far to follow the Sowings oihis most 
potent pen, before the heart pauses with delectable 
or dread emotion. Were ever the glowing offspring 
of Imagination so profusely generated, and seemingly 
so inadvertently? — the giving ' a local habitation' to 
a thousand childi'en of his fancy, appears to have no 
more impoverished his resources, than does the cease- 
less current of a mountain-spring exhaust its source. 
It is the question of a celebrated living writer, in 
reference to the Poet's mental fecundity, (I am not 
certain that I repeat it literally,) ' Had Shakspeare 
lived until now, could he have exhausted his ideas?'*" 
E. — " Of a verity never, never were orient pearls 
so much, at random strung, as by Immortal William! 
How is it that, in speaking of this Giant among the 
Great, and with voices, too, touched with veneration, 
we dare to syllable his deathless name, as though we 
were his comrades or his friends ? Is there witchery 
in JVilliam, which Joht has not? or, as we regard 

* If I have misquoted the Jearned and elegant author whose 
interrogation I intended to iterate, I supplicate mille pardons. My 
' Student' is on a visit, at a distance; and circumstances, which are 
often despotic, insist at present so urgently on dispatch, that its 
recall would be unprofitable for correction. 



A FEW WOKDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. lol 

in their works the Poetic Potentates thus severally 
surnamed, is our attachment — to one, impetuous ; to 
the other, timorous in its advances — swayed by dis- 
tinctive personal characteristics? Necker declared 
himself to be ' thunderstruck with the familiarity' of 
certain, who spoke of their Pascal, their Corneille : 
Pascal, illustrious in the high-priesthood of Piety, was 
the candidate for a more incorruptible crown than the 
Muse's ; but of a greater than Corneille, I — nay we, we 
British-born, a ' band of brothers' in our heartfelt 
homage to that Compatriot who hath no compeer, we 
talk of him as of an elder brother, because we feel that 
his noble nature would have scorned no fellowship 
which the known traits of that same noble nature had 
prompted in honest hearts. His pen, the pregnant 
channel of poetic thought, continually wins you to the 
Poet, who carries admiration, and affection with it, by 
a coup-de-grace, downy as a butterfly's wing. What 
feminine fortress could for a fortnight hold out against 
a style of archery such as — aimed by single shafts — 

' Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way 
Of starved people."* 

Contrast, for a moment, this finely-feathered arrow of 
Lorenzo with the blunted clothyard of bluff Harry V. 
Dr. Johnson, I believe, would rather have dispensed 

* Merchant of Venice, act t. 1. 



132 CHAPTER V. 

with Shakspeare's exhibition of the bold king in forma 
proci; but the lion of Bolt-court sleeps, and therefore 
inferior animals may more freely disport in ^that 
Realm of Opinion, which no law can reach.'* I 
would not yet exchange that sang froid suit of Harry, 
for a hundred specimens of more rarified sentimen- 
tality; 'tis a unique, and therefore estimable exposition 
of a brave, burly Briton, who would ' die 'tis true,' 
but for love, by the Lord, no!' Certes, in Will's 
coloring, that Conqueror out of his corslet is ' the 
best king of good-fellows;' and many thanks to the 
Warwickshire Wizard for a peep at fond-heartedness 
under ' a stubborn outside and aspect of iron.' 

' I speak to thee plain soldier. — And while thou liv'st, dear Kate, 
take a fellow of plain and uncoined constancy; for he perforce must 
do thee rig^ht, because he hath not the gift to woo in other places: 
for these fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into 
ladies' favors — they do always reason themselves out again. What! 
a speaker is but a prater ; a rhyme is but a ballad; a good leg will 
fall; a straight back will stoop; a black beard will turn white; a 
carl'd pate will grow bald; a fair face w'lW wither; a full eye will 
M'ax hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon, or, 
rather, the sun and not the moon, for it shines bright, and never 
changes, but keeps his course truly. And what say'st thou then to 
niy love ? Speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee.' 

" Kate naturally asks of her royal father's superior, 
' Is it possible dat I should love the enemy of France?' 

and liberal Hal replies by a tnorceau of rather pungent 

perplexity— 

* Bulwer. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEAKE. 133 

' No ; it is not possible that you should love the enemy of France, 
Kate : but in loving me you should love the friend of France ; for I 
love France so well, that / will not part with a village of it — I will 
have it all mine: and, Kate, when France is mine, and I am yours, 
then yours is France, and you are mine. 

' Kath. — / cannot tell vat is dat.' 

And when, at last, the 'phis belle Katherine et divine 
deesse'' finds the ' plain soldier' irresistible, and sur- 
renders, provided ' it shall please le roy son pere," 
Harry Plantagenet's portrait-painter displays a con- 
quering sovereign's smile, with great significancy : 

' Nay, it will please him well, Kate ; — it shall please him, Kate.' 

" To return again to Shakspeare general. Never 
was there a pioneer who inarched by a less circuitous 
route to the heart's core, or with more facility recorded 
its mazy workings and windings serpentine. He seems 
to have possessed a passport — a singular privilege 
of entree, of permanent validity, in virtue of which he 
penetrated without impediment to the springs of 
human action, though they were deeper by fathoms 
than the love of Rosalind;* and though many others, 
not unknown to poetic fame, have sounded and re- 
ported these hidden springs, whose reports have often 
been enveloped in obscurity weU-nigh profound as 
the springs themselves, — yet list to mighty Will, and 
you have their most lucid exposition, deepest meaning, 
* As You Like it, act iv. 3. 



134 CHAPTER V. 

truest import. Familiar with the world within world, 
man, as with the hornbook of liis infancy, 

' Turn liim to any cause of policy, 
The gordian knot of it he will unloose 
Familiar as his garter.' 

You alluded to the multiplicity of poetical beauties 
which distinguishes the page of Shakspeare, and to 
the apparent inadvertency "with which they were 
dispersed. Numerically, they are, indeed, a lovely 
legion; and in their careless, unstudied disposition, 
resemble (list, oh! Mary!) 

' a forest-bank in Spring, 
All flushed with violets and anemones.'* 

Are there any stores like unto Will's, from which 
admirers, entering with a cacoetJies excwpendi, return 
so laden with goodly proofs of Genius, Fancy, Wis- 
dom ? Open the massy volume of that 

' Bear Son of Memory, great Heir of Fame,' 

and over every of its prolific pages may we not each 
eagerly exclaim, with Fortinbras, 

' I have some rights of memory in this kingdom !'t 

" It is not possible satisfactorily to specialize beauty, 
where, as in that teeming treasure-house, the Works 

* Mrs. Hemans. f Hamlet, last scene. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 135 

of Sliakspeare^ its developments are innumerable as 
to the eye of childliood appear the stars of heaven. 
The casual quotation of passages from his works I 
dislike, though Coleridge, in asserting Shakspeare's 
unrivalled excellence, stated that ' proof positive' 
of that pre-eminency would be afforded by such a 
criterion: but the plan is objectionable; if the gem be 
estimable it should retain its author's setting. I 
tolerate no vagrancy here, (continued E. laughingly, 
laying his hand on the volume before him,) not even 
vagrant admiration: nay, I would conceal air-guns 
among these priceless leaves, that should explode 
upon fingers filching for Excerpta. Seriously — (you 
may say to me, as Goneril to her poor old father, 

' As you are old and reverend, you should be wise*) — 

seriously, then, is it satisfactory to turn Memory 
adrift here, like a cockle-boat on a shoreless sea ? is it 
not better far to sail leisurely round these flowery 
coral rocks, — to float slowly and admiringly over 
beds of shining pearl?" 

C. — " While your faculty of speech is recruiting 
strength, I frankly plead guilty of trespassing and 
poaching, against the statute you would establish. 
The Ivy Lodge quota of luxurious leisure is not, be 
it remembered, common to many; and in that one 
* King Lear, act i. 4. 



136 CHAPTER V. 

volume there is, to those to whom readmg is a relax- 
ation from the toil of life, ' the labor of an age in 
piled' leaves. A casual spoil of yesterday I found 
in an expression of Goneril's father : 

' O, how this mother swells toward my heart! 
Hysterica passio ! down, thou climbing sorrow, 
Thy element's below!'* 

In this exclamation there is a remarkable example 
of the rhetorical figure, prosopoeia : 

' Down, thou climbing Sorrow!' 

It would be difficult to adduce many instances in our 
tongue of personification more terse and emphatic; 
yet on the Poet's page it occurs but as an ordinary 
ebullition of the passionate Lear; — there is no flourish 
of trumpets in its neighbourhood, announcing that a 
king was about to make a right royal use of language. 
But the utter absence of oratorical ostentation is one 
especial characteristic of this voluminous author." 

E. — " ! what ineffable modesty may be beholden 
here, in union with transcendent majesty! — what 
wondrous ownership of almost superhuman genius, 
and entire abstinency from pretension ; — the giant's 
strength, exercised with girlish gentleness. Heard 
you ever this Poet, who, if inexhaustible versatility 
of mind might be allowed to justify self-complacency, 
* King Lear, act ii. 4. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 137 

might have lorded it as the Emperor of Egotists — 
yet where he himself may be suspected of the parole, 
heard you ever a prelude or coda to a passage how- 
soever grand or brilliant, which could be detected in 
resolving into ' I am Sir Oracle ?' Is not the tenor 
of the Poet's personal plea, 

' Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts?'* 

Was he not speaking for himself, when ' admired 
Miranda' accounted modesty as 'the jewel in her 
dower ?'t Mark, and inwardly digest, this speaking 
picture from the Winter's Tale,+ of feeling too deep 
'for words upon their streams to bear:' the king 
Leontes receives intelligence of his long-lost daughter; 
and the scene is with the king and an attached lord : 

' There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very 
gesture: tliey looked as they had heard of a world ransomed or one 
destroyed: A notable passion of wonder appeared in them: but the 
wisest beholder that knew no more than seeing, could not say if the 
importance were joy or sorrow; but in the extremity of the one, it 
must needs be.' 

The allusion to a cause of wonderment so grand as 
the loss or rescue of a world, sheds an halo of solemnity 
over this picture, which, as it essays to portray the 
intensity of parental joy, does not shock religious 
feeling by irreverent misplacement. But let us turn 
from the painting to the artist. Has he reserved 
* Henry v. Chorus. f Tempest, iii. 1. % Act v. 2. 

T 



138 CHAPTER V. 

tliis description for the pomp of royal recitation?^ — 
lias he allotted it to the humblest even of his heroes ? 
Nay, it comes from one of the dramatist's third-class 
personcB, a gentleman; — one of the Shaksperian school, 
though, who is not ^loth to cast away his speech, 
having taken great pains to con it,'* but who pre- 
faces this unlabored and exquisite recital with the 
apologetical assurance, 

' I make a broken delivery of the business.' " 

C. — " The patient endurance of Hermione, queen of 
Leontes, in that same play, has always appeared to me 
an admirable exemplification of a noble woman's de- 
portment under the keenest anguish known to virtue — 
the suspicion of its fidelity. In seasons when intense 
feelings rush into the heart like converging and 
convulsive waves, drowning its utterance, the eye 
frequently supplies a timely conduit from the swelling 
flood. No '^holy moisture,' however, relaxes the 
tense, tearless suiFerings of Hermione; and in the 
place of that fluent relief to speechless sorrow, we 
have the eloquent protestation of vilified Innocency : 
' Good my lords, 
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex 
Commonly are ; the want of which vain dew 
Perchance shall dry your pities : but I have 
That honourable grief lodged heke, tvMch burns 
Worse than tears drown.' f " 

* Twelfth-Night, act i. 5. t Winter's Tale, ii. 2. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. lo9 

E. — "A seeming echo from the very fount of grief! 
but of grief so uninterpretable, that in listening to 
those excellent accents of an injured Woman's woe, 
we may be said to incline our ear but to a parable- 
The misery of Hermione is of no oral kind — it must 
be borne incommunicably because it cannot be told: 
and as it is the privilege of woman's nature to be sus- 
ceptible of a finer because more sinless order of joy 
than man'sj is not more poignant woe, alas ! its contin- 
gent penalty? It is an occasional effect of the excess 
of sorrow to torpify and deaden the mind's emotions ; 
and it is to Massinger, I think, that we owe this 
exquisite delineation of such an effect : 

' Her cheek of youth was beautiful, 
Till withering sorrow blanch'd the bright rose there; 
But Grief did lay his icy finger on it. 
And chill'd her to a cold and joyless statue.' 

But in Hermione there is a confiict of strong passions 
which prevents her acute anguish from lapsing into 
lethargy. For it is the agony of one grand affection 
which sometimes subsides into stupor — the violence 
of an isolated passion which, from a state of perilous 
perturbation, declines to passiveness: in Hermione 
it is not solely the scorned wife who suffers wrong; it 
is also the loving mother, from whom her babe is torn, 
and she left desolate in her degradation. And well 
might her unweeping bosom hum with its parching 



140 CHAPTER V. 

burthen of 'honourable grief!' — sad spectacle to the 
imagination, a woman's breast made thus a battle- 
field for conflicting calamities — a prey, not to the 
ruthless, rapid outrages of a dismantling march, but 
to the scorching fury of a lasting strife. Ah ! it is a 
sorry sight to see, on this world's billows, a frail fabric 
of this our ' glassy essence,'* driven through the surge 
of sorrow by the gale of Passion; but more heart- 
rending is it, when hurricanes of Grief meet and con- 
tend, and lash that surge into sleepless tumult within 
the feeble frame of woman !" 

C — " Although few of us resemble Genevevef in 
preferring songs whose burden is grievous rather than 
joyous, there is a grandeur in the grief of Hermione, 
which we contemplate admiringly, as the enthusiastic 
artist the fascinating features of a chef-d'ceuvre. It is, 
in truth, a study, the character of Hermione, of Sorrow 
majestic in mould and symmetry: — how different in 
the sanctity of her distress is this cruelly-divorced wife, 
to the clamorous widow Constance ! % Hermione long- 
ing for her father's presence in her tribulation, ' for 
pity, not revenge;' Constance, in boisterous impre- 
cation — " 

E. — " Call the expression of that ardent mother's 
heart tiehement, not boisterous. Count it pragmatical 

* Measure for Measure, ii. 2. f In Coleridge's lines on "Love." 
% King John. Shakspeare. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 141 

if you will, but I interpose an objection to ' clamour' 
also, as descriptive of tlie boly energy of an anguished 
mother's love — and it is from anguished love that the 
fervor, sometimes the fearful fervor, of Constance 
derives its prime impetus. Ah ! that maternal instinct, 
which dwells in many mothers as a profound affection, 
seldom seen in strife, is in Constance developed in 
the throe and paroxysm of quick passion; her heart 
is at it were a volcano, from whence, mingling with 
the anathemas of indignant wrong, her mother's love 
gushes like terrific torrents of lava, and you wonder 
that her bosom is not burned by its indwelling fire. 

but a mystery of mysteries is, in the abstract, a 
Mother's love I — of many human feelings unfathomable, 
the most fathomless. Well ajErms one who knew its 
intensity, 

' There is none — 
In all this cold and hollow world — no fount 
Of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within 
A Mother's heart!'* 

1 protest that in all the copious chronicles which tell 
us of the heart's purest sensations and sympathies, I 
hear no thrilling tones of 

' The still, sad music of humanity,' 

which move me more mightily than does this ' Beauty 

* Mrs. Henians, 



142 CHAPTER V. 

of History,' told, I fancy, with intenser pathos in 
the French tongue than in ours : its brief exordium 
likewise justifies recital : — 

" ' Quelle plume pourroit peindre toutes les scenes 
de douleur ou de joie qui se passent dans le sein 
d'une mere! Qui pourroit decrire ses tendres sol- 
licitudes pour I'objet de sa tendresse; ses allarmes, 
ses agitations, lorsqu'elle est en danger de le perdre; 
son desespoir lorsqu'elle Fa perdu? La femme d'un 
noble Venitien, ayant vu mourir son fils unique^ 
s'abandonnoit aux plus cruelles douleurs : un religieux 
tachoit de la consoler. — * Souvenez-vous,' lui disoit-il, 
' du patriarche Abraham, a qui Dieu commanda de 
plonger lui-meme le poignard dans le sein de son fils, 
et qui obeit, sans murmurer.' ' Ah ! mon reverend 
pere,' repondit-elle, ' Dieu ti'auroit jamais commande 
ce sacrifice a une mere!' " 

C. — " Nor would any but a mother's heart have 
suggested the impossibility of God's requiring such 
a sacrifice. How many tender tales are told of ma- 
ternal love, the most unquenchable and unselfish of 
the aifections ; and often how unrequited is it by the 
object of its solicitude — solicitude which, in its quality 
of long-sufiferance, is of all human properties the near- 
est of kin to the divine attributes of pitying patience 
and freeness to forgive ; to the marvellous tenacity of 
maternal above all other tenderness it belongs, to live 



A WORD EN PASSANT UPON MRS. HEMANS. 14o 

on through despisal and rejection and long acquaint- 
ance with grief. Shakspeare, in Lear,* has made the 
maddened king invoke a malediction upon Goneril, 
which, dire in its import, affords proof of the un- 
bounded degree in which the Poet was conversant 
with the anatomy of the moral feelings, and with their 
respective vulnerability to the shafts of Calamity : 

' Turn all her mother's pains and benefits 
To laughter and contempt; that she may feel 
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
To have a thankless child!' 

" Of those who have most touchingly depicted the 
heaven-moidded lineaments of maternal love, con- 
spicuous is the Poetess whose affirmation of a mother's 
heart being the sole earthly fount of deathless love 
you just now repeated. ' Unused albeit to the melt- 
ing mood,'t I remember well, that on first reading^ 
her lines on the subject of ' Flowers and Music in a 
Room of Sickness,' — " 

E. — " 'Build there, carpenter — the air is sweet !'J" 
C. — " — strange symptoms of ' my mother came 
into mine eyes,'§ and ' made me play the woman. '^ 
" It is impossible,' remarked an eloquent preacher' 
whom I recently heard, ' it is impossible to possess 
without grief, if not without passion;' and it does- 

* King Lear, act ii. 4. f Othello, v. 2. % Troilus & Cressida, iii. 2, 
§ Henry v. act iv. 6. ^ Henry viii. act iii. 2. 



144 CHAPTER V. 

indeed appear inevitable to the abode of impetuous 

and pure Love, that Sorrow also should have its 

dwelling there. No light or easy yoke was that oi 

the affections to this most passible Poetess, with whose 

lay of love there ever mingled ' an under-music of 

lament r the tears of her love and sorrow ' flow into 

one another like crystal rivers,'* which bear along 

an ark magnificent, from whence proceeds awhile the 

voice of repining, anon of resignation, and then of rapt 

anticipation. Her allusions to the land which ' Sorrow 

and Death may not enter,' are, for the most part, 

glowing images of beatitude ; and she is impressive as 

Young in her spiritual communings and intercourse 

between the soul and its Source. Thus, when the 

hopeful Mother would reassure her Lilian of recovery 

and of ' going forth with the day-spring,' the latter 

responds — 

' Hope it not I 
Dream it no more, my mother! — there are things 
Known but to God and to the parting soul 
Which feels his thrilling summons.' 

" Over many of her paintings there is the mingled 
gorgeousness and sadness of an autumnal eve; for 
before her spirit's eye mantling shadows sometimes 
gathered, obscuring Hope's radiant smile; but a vision 
like hers, divinely fostered, could not long be dar- 
* Massinger. 



A PASSING COMMENT UPON YOUNG. 



145 



kened by tlie winter-clouds of Life and Death ; and 
as she advanced nearer to the Everduring Spring, O 
it is cheering to know that, 

' hour by hour, her soul's dissolving shroud 
Melted to radiance like a silvery cloud.'*" 

E. — " The Muse awarded to Mrs. Hemans a plume 
from the loveliest and a tone from the sweetest of the 
birds of Paradise, — ^before the plumage but after the 
song had suffered by the Fall, else had her strain 
been joyous as her tones are brilliant: now, however, 
hath she and Sorrow severed their alliance, and no 
longer doth her joy and love flow forth in ' broken 
music;' for now hath her emancipated spirit attained 
its apotheosis, 

* Where fiery passion-clouds have no abode, 
And the sky's temple-arch o'erflo.vs with GoD.'t 

" You mentioned the author of the Night Thoughts 
in remarkmg upon one of the rich veins in the mine 
of melody bequeathed to us by Mrs. Hemans — I mean 
that elevated tone in which she dilates on Life, and 
Death, and Immortality. E,everting for a moment to 
Young, — how impressively has that deep Thinker on 
those tremendous themes portrayed that momentous 
junction of life with death, to the realization of which 
* Poet's Dying Hymn. + Despondency and Aspiration. 



146 CHAPTER T. 

each one, in his own person, is surely but reluctantly 
advancing. Among much that may be turgid and 
bombastic in the Thoughts of Young, there are also 
startling outbursts of language, wherein the heaven- 
aspiring soul speaks vernacularly, — ebullitions of the 
overwrought and struggling spirit, which have no 
sympathy with the parade of words that may precede 
and follow it, and which must not suffer deterioration 
by the suspicion of such a sympathy: it would be 
unjust to the Poet and unprofitable to ourselves, to 
confound those fruitful oases with the quagmires by 
which they are not seldom surrounded. For my own 
part, I only perceive the Poet in these significant 
places — only recognize his voice when oppressed and 
dwarfish faculties seem to have been long grappling 
with gigantic meaning, and to have broken suddenly 
into almost-superhuman utterance. His grand con- 
ceptions wrestle in manacles as it were, till their 
moment of mental manumission, and then the Poet's 
spirit really ' speaks with his tongue.' I adverted to 
Young's delineation of the ' union redoutahle de la 
mort et de la vie.'* We may survey many galleries 
of poetic and prosaic pictures without lighting upon 
a representation of man going down to silence and 
the dust, more graphic than this : — 

* Madame de StaeL 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 1-iT 

' Life's little stage is a small eminence, 
Inch-high the grave above — that home of man 
Where dwells the multitude: we gaze around. 
We read their monuments — we sigh — 
And while we sigh we sink, and are what we deplore; 
Lamenting or lamented all our lotl' 

There is no waste of canvas or color here — but how 
effective is the painting ! 

" In the Night Thoughts of Young, the Poet often 
contemplates and sometimes confronts the Last Enemy; 
and over the pages which record this spectral inter- 
course there hovers a weird influence — a charnel- 
house effect — a gaunt semi-reality of the sable Foe, 
which, if it be all but unreal mockery, does never- 
theless ' feelingly persuade us what we are.'* Young 
summons ' spirits from the vasty deep,' and, more 
potent than Glendower,t they come at his bidding, 
and at their approach we mvoluntarily ' commune 
with our hearts, and are still.' Many other poets 
have likewise reported ghostly meditation upon death 
as conditional, and ghostly converse with Death as 
personal; and in Shakspeare — who not only pursued 
the vicissitudes of life to the grave and gate of death, 
but returned with the spirit to assert its wrongs — 
in his unfailing phrase-book of all our human feelings, 
we find frequent and earnest conjectures upon that 
condition to which we approximate, whose secrets 
* As You Like it, act ii. L t 1 Henry iv. act iii. L 



148 CHAPTER V. 

man learns only when he ceases to be .mortal. And 
these conjectures are conceived in various terms of 
doubt or definite expectancy, correspondent to the 
degree in which vague surmise or assured faith pre- 
vailed in the individual conjecturing. Yet, whether 
the soul be left to wander through an uncharted uni- 
verse at the dictate of its own untaught theories, or 
whether it be guided by precepts which cannot err, 
and which for ever point to a resting-place encircled 
by rivers of joy, — tjet does the immortal soul, a con- 
scious Renegade from Innocency, recoil from its last 
Retreat : 

' The wide, th' unbounded prospect lays before us, 
But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it.'* 

Dread instinct, which trembles at the barrier that 
separates us from bliss; but dread beneficently per- 
petuated, to restrain the religious from impatience, 
the rash from precipitancy. Alas! alas! were not 
man's Creator his Controller also, how many unpre- 
pared creatures would, in fanatic or romantic impulse, 
have hurried from the hallucinations or danced from 
the delights of this world, to the instant and inter- 
jninable destiny of the next!" 

C. — (After a pause.) — " The famous soliloquy in 
Hamlet is, probably, Shakspeare's grandest and most 
* Cato. Addison. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 149 

conspicuous embodiment of that funereal order of 
thought to which you have most exchisively alluded 
— the inquiry which starts instinctively from the soul, 
in reference to its destination at death. — 

' To die — to sleep ; 
No more? — and, by a sleep, to say we end 
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks 

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation 

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die; to sleep; 

To sleep! — perchance to dream! Aye, there's the rub: 

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 

Must give us pause.' 

But all such questionings are most definitely answer- 
able at the bar of Conscience, by the code of Truth ; 
and Shakspeare has arraigned at that tribunal crimes 
so various in magnitude, and reported mental conflicts 
so multifarious, with a pen so vivid, that in entering 
upon the subject with him, ' the world seems all 
before us,' and — " 

E. — " Therefore will we choose one only illustration 
of a conscience in revolt, the mutterings of murderous 
Macbeth. When I think of them I am sensible of a 
penchant for the perpendicular in ' each particular 
hair' of the scanty remnant left to me ; yet, start not, 
meek Maiden ! for thou, that knowest ' not the doc- 
trine of ill-doing,' * canst little comprehend the torture 
* Winter's Tale, act i. 2. 



150 CHAPTER V. 

which e'en here treads hard on guilt — unimaginable 
to thy timidity is the cowardice begot by crime. — 

* One cried, ^God bless us!' and, 'Amen!' the other; 
As they had seen me with these hangman's hands. 

/ could not say ' Amen,' 
When they did say ' God bless us!' 

' Lady Macbeth. — Consider it not so deeply. 

' But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen 9' ' 

Ah! Mr. C.^ were all our designs invariably referred 
to the high court of equity that sits within, and its 
decrees made absolute in our actions, soon would 
shoals of a certain species of fish — by some naturalists 
called the land-shark — offend, by stagnancy, the air 
at Westminster and elsewhere. Mourning, ye gowned 
gentry! mourning, with Othello, your occupation gone, 
are there many who, in grievous destitution of chattels, 
might righteously compute as their own, hoth 

' Their robe and their integrity to heaven ?' 



" Now were you to forswear Ivy Lodge for ever, 
as the penalty of its occupier's prolixity, I could 
not forbear mentioning a colloquy in Measure for 
Measure, between the noble Isabella and her brother 
Claudio : the circumstances are her dishonor, or the 
alternative, his death. ' The dread of something after 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE, 151 

death' unmans him, and he quails like a coward in 
shuddering hesitancy between opposing evils ; — before 
him are shadowy horrors ; behind, the urgent, lofty, 
and sometimes-indignant honor of his sister. ' Death,* 
murmurs the reluctant sacrifice, 

' Death is a fearful thing. 

' Isabella. — And shamed life a hateful. 

' Aye, but to die, and go we know not wherej 
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot ; 
This sensible, warm motion to become 
A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit 
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice; 
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, 
And blown with restless violence round about 
The pendant world ; or to be worse than worst 
Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts 
Imagine howling! — 'tis too horrible! 
The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment 
Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
To what we fear of death.' " 

The garrulous old man identified himself so per- 
fectly with the shrinking Claudio in the recital of this 
fine passage, that when he resumed his original 
character I borrowed from the Sun's Darling of Ford 
— a play from which he had previously quoted — an 
exclamation of Raybright ; 

" ' Your eyes amazed me first, but now mine ears 
Feel your tongue's charm !' " 



15S CHAPTER V. 

E. — " Nay, the praise be great and glorious Will's. 
But now, liaving dwelt at tolerable length, upon the 
dread of death and the timidity of wisdom, turn we 
for a moment to what my friend Folly might have 
laughed at as something like ' the bravery of igno- 
rance.'* Know, firstly, then, that besides enjoying 
the confidence of these slumbering dependents in wiry 
confinement, and sundry domesticated animals of which 
I am in some instances sole proprietor and in others 
patron, I have the honor to be on excellent terms 
with at least a dozen urchins of my neighbours. The 
hour is long since gone when the mere imagery of 
grace and beauty had power to charm — when I feasted 
Fancy on the regimen of Robbie Burns, ' the admiring 
a fine woman ;'t and long hath the sage Maximist, 
great William of immortal memory, convinced me 
that goodness is loveliness, and ' Virtue is beauty. '+ 
And with these changed feelings I keep pace with 
lamented Letitia Landon in love of the frank, fond 
heart — the ' sprightfulness, the fair cheeks and full 
eyes'§ of boyhood. It would warm you. Sir, in a 
December morning, to see the rosy fronts and guile- 
less humour of the fellows of whom I spoke, upon 
whom I confer a brief happiness by a smile, a penny, 
and a pat on the head; and how pitiable the pale, 

* The Sun's Darling, act i. 1. f Letter to Thomson. 

:J: Twelfth-Night, iii. 4. § Jeremy Taylor. 



CHAPTER V. 153 

precocious boys in town appear, to these, my jocund 
younkers ! The mother of one of them — a reckless, 
ruddy rebel, rising five — told me a few weeks ago, 
that the child came home upon a cloudy afternoon, 
with a serious look imusual. He had just witnessed 
a funeral; and a resolution was founding itself upon 
an apprehension which the funeral, taking place at 
that hour, had excited. Presently, with a countenance 
as portentous as if he had been an avant-courier of the 
earthquake, he expressed to his mother a solemn 
protest against being buried in the afternoon of a 
winter-day — in case he should'' nt get to heaven lefore 
dark!" 

The sixth stroke towards ten was sounding, when 
E.'s veteran retainer announced the vehicle in which 
his daughter-in-baptism was accustomed to migrate 
to and from Ivy Lodge. There was a striking con- 
trast in the physiognomical aspects of the Elder and 
his servant; for while the former was habitually 
mirthful, there was a settled sedateness in the face 
of the latter which remained unruffled, either by 
smile or frown, under the raillery of liis voluble but 
kind superior. His gesture, too, was desperately 
methodical ; evincing none of that submission to im- 
pulse which ever animated the demeanor of his master. 
On that declining plane of our mortal term, where- 
from, when man brings his years to an end, he 



154 CHAPTER Y. 

slides into the grave, it was hard to say which of the 
two was foremost ; but if the domestic were "^ under 
authority," he did not appear to derive contentment 
in the especial circumstance of contiguity with a 
clime in which distinctions cease — in the prospect of 
a situation without servitude, or such as is perfect 
freedom. If his were a gravity impressed by con- 
templation of the grave — and a thoughtless man would 
not long have sojourned with E. — the object of his 
contemplation must have been hung with branches of 
yew and cypress, to which he was advancing through 
a vale of tears ; to the Elder, in whose tone when con- 
versing upon " the inevitable hour" there was neither 
timer nor presumptions confidence, the narrow-house 
seemed garlanded more than sadly closed in with 
evergreen. This was the outline of his argument: 
— " It is not meet that guests-expectant of a Great 
King, such as is He who claims our souls' allegiance 
— that children journeying to the home of a Father, 
who waits to welcome them by a better name than 
sons — should march mournfully to their eternal man- 
sions ; and though we lay our bodies down to moulder 
for a while in the vestibule of the Sovereign's court — 
at the threshold of the home of spirits — hath not One, 
mighty to save, prepared at infinite cost a pathway for 
the disembodied divinity, by which it mounts through 
the else trackless space to its celestial father-land? 



CHAPTER V. 155 

The dust importunes us in tlie pleadings of natural 
alliance, and our voices catch a gloomy tone from its 
importunity; while we, meantime forgetful that we 
are but temporary aliens from angelic fellowship, sad- 
den the hours of our exile, by suspending our harps 
upon the willows, instead of sounding them to songs 
of thankfiilness for that measui'eless gift of promise — 
life in the land of Love — whereof, to the grateful, the 
earnest of possession is sometimes anticipated, through 
the inspiration of Heaven's prime legate, Hope ! 

' Wliy should we, then, with an untov/ard mind, 
And in the weakness of humanity, 
From natural wisdom turn our hearts away, 
To natural comfort shut our eyes and ears, 

»And, feeding- on disquiet, thus disturb 
The calm of nature with our restless thoughts ?'*" 

The stroke was on six, I said, when Mary was 
favored with an injunction to move: whereupon E. 
rejoined, 

" Now fie, say I, upon thy pestilent punctuality, 
punctilious Ben! who, nathless that our pates have 
whitened in company, hast no consideration for my 
comfort — positively none! Harkee, Benjamin the 
inflexible! since Mr. C, in unappreciable kindness 
to thy grim-visaged nephew, has chosen to be my 
bonny half-bairn's charioteer, I suspect thou hast, 

I* The Excursion, Wordsworth. 



156 CHAPTER V. 

in gratitude to him, propelled the movements of the 
clocks, sir. — Now it contenteth the responsible tenant 
of the Lodge to keei^ up with the age — nay, Ben, to 
jog along a little in the rear, having cheerful co-mates 
in our ivied exile. But, O Watchman set in alabaster, 
what of the night?" 

Benjamin replies, and makes his exit; and the 
Elder changes his key. 

" Within those stolid and impassive outworks there 
beats a brave heart and warm; and if Benjamin were 
taken from me, then indeed should I be bereaved. 
If there are two living creatures who understand 
each other hetter than do Ben and I, it would gratify 
my curiosity to see them. — My pleasantry passes by 
him, as you observe, like an idle wind; and though I 
indulge in it at times too freely, I never disturb his 
serenity nor affright his propriety. Once, only, did 
he dubiously regard me — it was when, in gardening 
operations, I professed mj'self to be almost a proselyte 
to the Wordsworthian theory of a sentient principle 
in plants: at what to him appeared the monstrous 

* faith, that every flower 
Enjoys the air it breathes,' 

Ben twisted his countenance to such an expression 
of adamantine infidelity, that, rather than endanger 
the issue of a writ De Limatico inquirendo, at the suit 



CHAPTER V. 157 

of my servants, I suiFer Benjamin to remain in un- 
molested herbal heathanism. But we are deserting 
our Idol of the evening without one ' Praise and Peace 
be to thee, Poet-King !' — anon of thee. Monarch of 
the Muse's Sons! And bless thee, darling Child — 
Mary avourneen ! Look now, the sky is one wide smile, 
but chastened, for the glittering orbs are in adoration, 
could we but hear them. Or rather, is it not the 
boundary of the Blest we see above us? and what 
we count as shining stars, are they not angels' eyes — 
bright, but full of pity as they gaze on a scene which 
the presence of ilieir God does not gladden? — Aye, 
herein lies the secret of the pensiveness of Night. — 
Surely at this moment is God beautifying and hallow- 
ing the world with his blessing; and living things are 
breathing — scarcely breathing is the hushed Earth — 
as conscious of the effluence of Heaven. A fond 
farewell, sweet Mary! — forget not the Old Man's 
many errors in thy prayers !" 



COLLOQUY IV. 



CONCERNING, CHIEFLY, 

" THE BLIND OLD MAN, AND HIS IMMORTAL STORY 
OF A LOST PARADISE." 

It would be a mode of proceeding quite un-English, 
to enter upon several consecutive colloquies, -without 
commenting on the state of the weather. Moreover, 
when, without violating Truth to gratify Patriotism, 
a compliment ca7i be paid to the cHmate of his 
country, it is a Briton's duty to do so; for foreign 
calumnies upon our native skies are permitted to 
provoke undue contumely firom a people incontinently 
prone to grumble among themselves, at much that 
invigorates their individual constitution and national. 
Touching that basely-traduced atmospherical pro- 
duction, called Enghsh weather, we owe an immense 
amount of gratitude to that more dauntless class of 
Nature's minstrels, who, leaving gentler poets to tune 
their paeans to stars and zephyrs, proclaim the sterner 



160 CHAPTER VI. 

charms of hail, snow, wind, storm, and vapour. And, 
because eccentric and half-anomalous, among this 
" dauntless" band, let us elect the mild Cowper, for 
himself and clan, as the recipient of our gratulations. 
It is pleasure, slightly tinged with pity, to find the 
valiant valetudinarian — bold in seclusion, timid in the 
shock of men — scourging the pleasant vices of the 
herd, which he, " a stricken deer," had quitted; — 
right comfortable is it, to see him putting upon his 
country a commanding aspect which he could not 
put upon himself; and to hear him thus venting the 
healthy vigor of his English heart, before one of the 
gloomiest of national pictures — 

" Though thy clime 
Be fickle, and thy year most part deform'd 
With dripping rains, or wither'd by a frost, 
I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies, 
And fields without a flower, for warmer France 
With all her vines, nor for Ausonia's groves 
Of golden fruitage and her myrtle bowers." 

Now in the creed of one at least (and of the least) 
of liis compatriots, of few pleasanter sensations is this 
cold hut of human clay susceptible, than when the 
genial sun melts all the heart within it into a gladness 
so diffusive, that after inundating all surrounding' 
objects with its viewless flood of joy, it extends a 
large flow of compassion to those blinded masses 
abroad, who imagine the Indomitable Isle to be en- 



CHAPTER VI. 16X 

veloped in perpetual hrouillards. If our variations do 
frequently outstrip the almanack, and carry despair 
to elderly gentlemen subject d V ennuyeuse maladie, ce 
de conserver la sante par tm trop grand regime,^ do 
tliey not also afford to our native autliors a topic so 
inexhaustible, that every fact which may occur, or 
fiction which may be conceived, can, in description, 
be furnished with express circumambient drapery and 
decoration? There is in Britons a proverbial power 
to hear, — a property which pleases our statesmen and 
has puzzled our foes; and the British skies possess a 
similar quality in an eminent degree ; for those of any 
other country, having had to withstand an equal share 
of chiefly-abusive remark, would have been worn out 
by commentators. The canopy of Britain being more 
notable for the variety of its patterns than for their 
scenic sublimity, we have no artistes whose especial 
forte is firmamental; — there are, however, several 
literary aerial limners, of exquisite touch, within the 
United Kingdom of our Sovereign Lady the Queen, 
— on whose august person may " the heaven rain 
odours," and, on her loyal realms, abimdance and 
the spirit of Contentment. 

The individual who presumes, by thus pream- 
bidating, to delay the enthusiastic Elder's entry, (the 
privilege of an uninterrupted parley after that event 
* La Rocliefoucauld. 



162 CHAPTER VI. 

being exceedingly hopeless,) has advocated more dis- 
heartening causes than that which now, in defence of 
his country, and without " consideration" of any kind, 
he undertakes on behalf of the climate of his client. 
He addresses, of course, a wise and discriminating 
jury ; and contends, of course with deference, that to 
an English subject upon whose amiable temperament 
the evidence of sociality has a soothing eifect, and 
who (perchance not having cared " to unsphere the 
spirit of Plato,") may, in the lower walks of practical 
philosophy, be contenting himself by simply making 
the best of his condition at all times and in all places, 
to such an one it cannot be merely reconciling, it 
must be a matter of active rejoicing, that the Four 
Seasons which preside over his country's year, and 
exercise extensive influence on his country's weal, 
should present, as they do, a truly edifying example 
of mutual good feeling in their intercourse with each 
other. Now this disposition is rarely found in a 
limited coterie, where separate interests strongly 
prevail, and jealoiisy is prompt to rise at ofiicious 
intermeddling. Our Seasons maintain a most cordial 
intimacy, and exchange visits and compliments, sans 
ceremonie; and that lively movement of barometrical 
mercury at which a maledictory man might rail, the 
complacent jury I have the honor to address would 
delight in, as an incontestable token that one of the 



CHAPTER VI. 163 

subdominant three was on a visit to the regnant 
Season. Where, too, in this " low-thoughted " sphere, 
a small number of functionaries attain alternatively a 
chief and brief authority, their individual period of 
pre-eminency is very nicely marked: — our British 
Seasons scorn a duration of presidency so accurately 
defined: — there is a noble free-and-easiness in each 
one's entrance upon duty, and exit from it, that 
expands the ideas to reflect upon. And in this habit 
of intervisitation one with another, the more sanguine 
of the panel before which I am privileged to plead, 
will immediately recognize the interest which the 
entire Quaternity take in the affairs of Earth, under 
different control. It may not be absurdly unreason- 
able to regret, that when the veteran (though volatile) 
Herald of Father Christmas looks abroad out-of-season, 
there should be a cramping influence in his eye, which 
at one period leaves shrubs, etc. in a state of nudity 
when additional clothing is commonly preferred; and, 
at another period, creates a panic on the banks at 
which pale snowdrops sicken and go off in convulsions, 
— which staggers itinerant melodists in mid-air, ex- 
cites a general shudder among nestlings, and hurries 
many a newly-perfected chrysalis to a bourne from 
whence no butterfly returns. His occasional visits to 
the mellow matron, Autimm, are, socially, beneficial, 
as reminders to the benevolent in high places that 



164 CHAPTER VI. 

in lower places the large family of Penury will soon 
look longingly for 

" little, nameless, unremember'd acts 
Of kindness and of love ;"* 

and if, in the liberality of his old heart, he acts as 
proxy for the infant Spring, who can scowl at courtesy 
commendable though cold? Howbeit, fair ladies and 
judicious gentlemen of the jury, in social reciprocity 
the Rulers of the British Year exercise dominion: 
— by-and-by (is not pertness natural to the very, 
lo&ry pretty?) the bright-eyed Spring bids laughing 
defiance to her bald-headed Predecessor, who (in the 
natural irritability of age,) blows chillingly upon her 
cheek of smiles, sometimes even to their scattering; 
— and, later, (can there exist a heart which such 
solicitude affects not?) how often do we perceive the 
ardent Summer adventuring into the realm of retiring 
Autumn, to bless with one more kiss the Earth's 
frail offspring, ere Autumn commits them to the cold 
arms of Winter ? 

The loving Summer retired from active duty in 
1841 with blushing honors thick upon her. A fiat 
had gone forth, benedictory to the harvest and the 
store, and she responded cheerily to His benevolent 
will whose minister she is: — the burdened fields, 
* Wordsworth. 



CHAPTER YI. 165 

therefore, stood so thick with corn, that the churl 
might have found their rejoicing contagious, as by 
hill-side and lowland the ripening grain bent its 
burnished head to the soft breeze. It was making 
glad the heart of man, and kept time to its low con- 
gratulatory chant in these gentle undulations, as at 
sweet music, lovely Lady, you may have swayed your 
own fair form, impulsively. 0, Wordsworth ! chief 
among the wise who proclaim a sentient attribute in 
whatsoever the Inscrutable hath endowed with life, 
a glorifying creed is thine, and is not visionary. — 
Conscious, by the demonstrations of science, that we 
are in contact with fecund animation, though to the 
eye invisible, is it Wisdom which contemns the pro- 
bability that we are dwellers in a vocal universe, 
because upon our drowsied sense no audible accents 
fall? If the eye be veiled from the perception of an 
animated, why may not the ear be deafened to an 
articulate world? Constructed and capacitated as we 
now are, the Eternal " hath done wisely to conceal " 
from this, our orbed observatory, a view as much too 
vivid for our comfort as for our comprehension; for 
how much greater latitude of emotion should we 
require above that which we possess, if to the Kttle 
microcosm, man, the vast and busy creation were 
suddenly manifested in all its marvellous operations. 
But this acquisition of intelligence is wisely reserved 



166 CHAPTER VI. 

for a period when awe and wonder shall be excited 
by many mighty discoveries, beside those pertaining 
to our terrestrial sojourn: yet, among those dis- 
coveries, thy faith, persevering Interpreter of the 
Invisible and Inaudible! shall, doubtlessly, approve 
its demonstrator and defender to have possessed a 
vision clarified above his contemporaries, — a mind 
whose ideality was less a baseless fabric of the fancy 
than the outlines of a grand reality, which the rolling 
away of cataract and cloud from human sight shall 
leave disclosed, in the fulness and perfection of a 
divine development. 

Towards the close of an Autumn day, (of which 
digression has so procrastinated the description, that 
now I decline it altogether,) the Elder, in a rustic, 
ivy-covered garden-seat, was luxuriating in the light 
of a setting sun, the quivering song of the more wake- 
ful or belated of the feathered quire, and the company 
of rosy-tinted but well-nigh wearied flowers. 

"Ah!" said he, on observing me, " is not this a 
season and a scene in which, if ever, we may imagine 
the primal state of our first progenitors, when, seated 
in a sinless sanctuary, and sheltered by their Maker's 
smile, they watched this wondrous receding of Day 
and solemn approach of Night? But I was gazing 
slothftiUy when I saAV you — 

' Thought ivas not — in enjojraent it expired' 



CHAPTER VI. 167 

as I sat imbibing the still spirit of the spectacle-^ 
for it is eminently one of those, whereof 

' The colours and the forms are unto us 
An appetite — a feeling and a love 
Which have no need of a remoter charm 
By thought supplied, or any interest 
Unhorrovv'd from the eye.'*" 

I expressed regret that, by obtruding, I had broken 
the spell which had bound him in so blissful a state 
of bondage. 

E. — " Save your regrettings for a more deserving 
occasion: I prefer quick feelings to supine; — silent 
felicity engenders indolence of thought, and that 
which is now voluptuousness, presently degenerates 
to vapidity. How potent are external influences 
upon the mind — so various, too, in their effects, that 
the inner world of the feelings makes its diurnal 
revolution, and exhibits a different phase at morn, 
and noon, and eve, and night. When I go out in the 
fresh vigor of the morning, and am in health, I feel 
to this day something of the exidtation of my early 
life, when Care went not up with me at morn into the 
high places, and every ecstatic throb of the heart, 
could it have spoken, would have 

' Bless' d God for the mountains I't 

'Mornings are mysteries,' says an old poet:+ their 
* Wordsworth. f Mary Howitt. t Honry Vaughan. 



168 CHAPTER VI. 

effect of light and air stirred up electrically the whole 

inert and latent joy within me, and my mood was wildly 

thankful; — the wildness has somewhat abated, owing 

to ' auld acquaintance' with him of whom (pointing to 

his forehead,) these indentures witness, aided by the 

circumstance of having here no hills to climb ; yet my 

out-door morning feelings could not, even now, be 

called serene. 

" It is very different in this holy hour of eve, when 

the West summons every eye to witness this gorgeous 

pageantry of the Sun's descent, and Earth regards 

her life-giver's departure in admiration mute — for the 

sadness of a farewell prevails, and living things look 

anxiously upon their source of life, and seem to 

dread his going down, as if there were a danger of 

his not returning. We feel no predominant passion 

now to 'bless God for the mountains;' our paramount 

praise is for the hope of glory; and, that yielded, in 

sober gratitude for all this shadowing forth of Might 

and Mercy, we pour the full heart of adoration forth 

in strains like these — too majestically-moving for my 

befitting utterance during the abandon of the morn : — 

' These are thy glorious works, Parent of good ! 

Almighty! thine this universal frame, 

Thus wondrous fair; Thyself how wondrous then? 

Unspeakahle, who sitt'st above these heav'ns 

To us invisible, or dimly seen 

In these thy lowest works; yet these declare 

Thy goodness beyond thought, and power divine.' " 



CHAPTER VI. 169 

The Old Man's voice discoursed eloquent music, 
but he looked unutterable meaning — as though, 

' with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony and the deep power of joy, 
He saw into the life of things.'* 

" The sweet face of the Night" had solemnized his 
manner, and he retained a peculiar gravity; — his 
varieties of feeling were exceedingly remote, but were 
always expressive and never extravagant; — they were 
not "piteous revolutions." It seemed as if the hymn 
from which he had quoted in the garden had supplied 
him adventitiously with a text whereupon to descant; 
for on adjourning to the interior he opened the Para- 
dise Lost, and commenced devoutly : 

£. — " Entering on this Poem we feel, or ought to 
feel, that we are in sacred precincts, and that at its 
elevated threshold we should put away from us the 
defilement of mean associations. Resigning ourselves 
to an atlantean and adventurous Guide, we are carried 
to the black and sulphurous abyss of anarchy, — are 
wafted through infinite space, — and ascend, ' by de- 
grees magnificent, beyond the wall of heaven.' — 
But the way, which is sometimes drear and dark, is 
at other times labyrinthine and obscure ; and well it 
is if, where we cannot move by sight, we firmly pro- 
ceed by faith ; for lore which the Omniscient withheld 
* Wordsworth. 



170 CHAPTER VI. 

from ' holy men of old,' He has not in these latter days 
communicated ; and therefore Milton, in the process 
of an argument, anticipatory of man's creation and 
historic of his fall, has found himself in occasional 
embarrassment in 'vindicating' the Eternal. — And 
necessarily so ; for His thoughts are not our thoughts, 
and who hath been His counsellor ? In the Father's 
address to the Son,* for instance, contemplating the 
seduction of our Sire by satanic guile, the Poet is in 
one of those inscrutable involutions of 'foreknowledge, 
■will, and fate,' which Inspiration has not elucidated, 
and which is, consequently, inexplicable by human 
reason. Now that the original terms of obedience have 
been revoked by rebellion, our present terms oi faith 
are based on this partial concealment of the plan of 
Providence ; for there could be no exercise of credence 
if all that concerns our hope and trust were manifest. 
Yet how ample the foundation prepared for the 
fabric of our faith, would we not crowd and cumber 
it with our prejudices and gainsayings. Beset by the 
machinations of a mighty Foe, are we not bidden 
to confide boldly in a more puissant Friend? 

• O ! but man ! proud man, 
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,' 

protests ! — cavils with his Creator ! The tenant of an 
* Paradise Lost, book iii. 



CHAPTER VI. 171 

hour, in his tabernacle of clay, engages in controversy 
with the self-existent Architect of the universe — im- 
pugns the Mind of which his loftier part is now but 
a polluted essence! Oh! disclaiming impious com- 
parison, next among marvels to the love of God, is 
the presumption of the outcast, man, 

" The abstract contemplation of a lost paradise 
incites to a fruitless lament for felicity we never 
knew, which, however, gives way to a profound 
contentment, when we summon to the side of our 
pining souls the reinforcements provided by our Re- 
ligion, which, ordinarily, we permit to remain too 
much in ineiFective reserve. In the strife we have 
hourly to sustain we draw not largely enough upon 
our almighty Ally, who, though we too oft forget, 
remembers ever that we are but dust: and considering 
that our hearts' instinctive craving is for a consolation 
they cannot find in the world's corrupted cisterns, it 
is curious that they should leave comparatively for- 
saken the fountain which flows with the only efficient 
solace for the sinking spirit. Marshalling the host of 
evidences which Heaven has unrolled before the ken 
of humanity, the mind erects itself as it were on an 
impregnable rampart, from whence it placidly regards 
the petty perplexities of life, and arms its hopes with 
weapons which, wrought in a celestial armoury, scatter 
this world's disheartenments swiftly as at the sword 



172 CHAPTER VI. 

of Michael the rebel angels fled. I delight in the 
assertion, and in its reiteration, that ' there is nothing 
so reasonaUe as Religion :' — assuredly there is nothing 
so protective, for the feeble being whose reliance 
it is, ' gathers a force and faith under him, which 
nature of itself could never attain ;'* — there is nothing 
so consolatory, for ' it creates new hopes when all 
earthly hopes fail;'t — there is nothing so ennobling, 
for the ceaseless employment of the religious man is 
that of ' fitting up his mind and preparing it for a 
glorious abode ;'+ — and, in reference to a quality 
seldom made the subject of special avowal, ' you may 
depend upon it religion is, in its essence, the most 
gentlemanly thing in the world. It will alone gentilize, 
if unmixed with cant, and I know nothing else that 
will, alone. '§ 

" I soijietimes think, that in the dread Day of Award 
Silence will for a moment seal the lips of the redeemed, 
while, with sublimated glance, they survey the various 
pathways whereby the ardent seekers after Truth 
have attained their goal, and what impediments they 
have battled with and beaten, and dispiritings sur- 
mounted : but silence may endure but for a moment ! 
—the amazing Love that ransomed, and righteous 
Judgment that adjudicates, shall awaken in Heaven's 

* Lord Bacon. f Sir Humphrey Davy. 

J Vicar of Wakefield, ch. 29. § Coleridge's Table-Talk. 



CHAPTER VI. 173 

' new possessors' a spontaneous and accordant shout, 
so mighty that through the realm of God their rapture 
shall drown in its loud resonance the minstrelsy that 
ceases never to magnify the Most High. For the 
harp and lute of those who never knew distrust of 
soul or sorrow of heart cannot rival their voice which 
triumph animates; the blessings of those whose high 
estate has shut out woe, must be overborne by theirs 
to whom the transition is from anguish to bliss; the 
adoration of those to whom Justice has never been 
obscured, shall certainly be overwhelmed in their 
acclamations, who, once, it may be, dubious, shall 
view the All- Adorable in the sanctity and glory of 
His most perfect * vindication.' 

" And if there be one attribute that, more than any 
other, the Great Judge will be jealous to present 
in all the refulgency of righteousness, it will be (as I 
humbly conceive) His justice : — in an apportionment 
involving interests so tremendous. He will not leave 
the shadow of a right to complain; and where rewarded 
Virtue shall applaud, rejected Vice shall be speech- 
less. We reverence Justice here: — even in the 
marred visage we detect majestic lineaments; and 
lifting our imaginations to its divine excellency, who 
would not acknowledge it as an attribute worthy the 
jealous guardianship of the Godhead. Imagine, for 
a moment, the exercise of omnipotence, in awful 



174 CHAPTER VI. 

isolation from justice. An arm that had fashioned 
and sustained an animated world by the sole authority 
of its strength, yielding to no loftier guidance in its 
terrible and arbitrary volition — such an arm, in its 
subsequent liuman creation, could scarcely have woven 
the ennobling principle of a right discernment with 
the elements of its new-constructed creature. But 
it is a consideration demanding from every thoughtful 
soul its extremest capacity of thankfulness, that the 
absolute sovereignty which is enthroned on high, is 
irradiated by manifold benign attributes, and that the 
allegiance which the Supreme might have enforced 
by the overwhelming influence of power. He invites 
by a condescending love: and although He would 
convince the hearts of all men by the restraining 
assurance, that He is * the Almighty God,' pursuing 
the impenitent with His vengeance; yet is He more 
desirous to be sought as ' the Lord from whom are 
mercies and forgivenesses.' And recognizing Him as 
the infinite '^ I am' of every conceivable perfection, it 
was evidently essential to the purpose for which the 
prime object of this lower world was designed, that 
the made should be moulded in a distant but distinct 
resemblance to the Maker. Thus, a true and sacred 
sense oi justice became a constituent in the mysterious 
combination, Man; and this judiciary attribute, as all 
may testify, has survived every vicissitude of time 



CHAPTER VI. 175 

and all the antagonism of sin; and will, we are assured, 
be with each one of us in the assembled quick and 
dead, to vindicate, at that thronged tribunal, the 
integrity of the divine decision. 

" I know of no scepticism or scruples from certain 
apparent incongruities which meditative men have 
told me debar them from a devout acceptation of the 
creed on which our souls' hopes are founded; — that 
infinite Perfection, armed with a controlling power, 
is yet permissive of the propagation of Evil; that 
Purity, although it abhors and denounces, coerces not. 
I am not confounded by the sufferings of the virtuous, 
the sorrows of the good, the seeming exemption of 
the vile, the ostensible ease of the indiiFerent, the 
occasional perplexity of the inquiring. These are 
incidents contingent with, and partly constituting, 
the probationary process by which, through privation 
and discouragement, we are re-fitted for Paradise. 
— I have found my questionings of possibility most 
prone to rise, over the chronicles of God's compas- 
sion: His infinite power is a visible property; His 
bounty is both visible and tangible; but that 'the 
Brightness of his Glory' should have assumed 
our nature, and in it have endured rejection from 
those whom He came to ransom; — that in virulence 
and violence He should yet have summoned no awe- 
struck legions from the realms of light, to avenge the 



176 CHAPTER VI. 

indignities their celestial Cliief was enduring at the 

hands of men, in order that he might snatch them as 

brands from the burning; — that though the penalty 

of the prodigious enterprise was a sustenance of the 

Curse, under which he who bore it must yield his 

heart's blood, now in protracted passion through the 

imperceptible pore, and then in sacrificial agony 

through the gaping wound; — that immaculate and 

infinite Compassion, without demeaning the divinity, 

should taste of death in its most degraded form, 

that earth's grovelling ingrate might be exalted among 

' the enthroned gods in sainted seats,' — is an exaction 

upon the faith of a contemplative mind which might 

disturb it with incredulity, were the records less 

trustworthy which relate, to selfish men, the mystical 

vastness of the divine sympathy. 

" One especial moral springs from the meditation 

of this marvellous oblation of Love — 'tis the trusting 

all to Him. There can be no sympathy in heaven 

with the self-sufficient. From the hour of that most 

daring insurrection in Thine own abode, has it not 

been seen, that, 

' Merciful Heaven! 
Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt, 
Splitt'st the unwedgable and gnarled oak 
Than the soft mj^tle?'* 

* Measure for Measure. Shakspeare. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. i i i 

" I have perambulated far from the Poem, in all 
this; but serious thoughts flow naturally from its 
solemn theme, and forcibly to divert or counteract 
their current is ill beseeming a man who cannot be 
far distant from ' an abiding city, a place in another 
country, where he must rest or else be restless for 
ever.'* Let us however enter, for a little while, this 
Lost Paradise, at whose exterior we have thus lin- 
gered. 

" Yet, pausing for a brief moment at its entrance, 
is it not beyond expression interesting, to review, 
through the medium of truthful history and apocry- 
phal tradition, the process by which this stupendous 
poetic pyramid was reared— a structure so unapproach- 
able in the grandeur of its symmetry, that the solitary 
achievements of others — imposing when solitarily 
surveyed — appear insignificant if brought into juxta- 
position with it. There exists an indestructible cluster 
of the habitations of Poesy, distinguished by various 
charms; but they shrink into shadow when viewed 
by an eye which the contemplation of dimensions so 
vast has distended and enlarged. ' It is not the great- 
est of heroic poems, only because it is not the Jlrst,' 
says Dr. Johnson; but stands it not unparalleled in 
its sublimity f From what we know of Milton's self- 
dependency, I fancy there was never a Poet who, 

* Taylor. 



178 CHAPTER VI. 

conscious of having consummated a great work, of 
which many co-operating causes might tend to mar 
the reputation at the period of its completion, con- 
fided so assuredly in ultimate appreciation, as did 
this illustrious man. The contrast between Milton 
and Shakspeare in this respect, is remarkable: the 
latter sensitively shrinks from posthumous notoriety; 
and in his poems almost painfully protests against 
being made a candidate for the plaudits of posterity : — 

' O if (I sajO you look upon this verse, 
Wiien I perhaps compounded am with clay, 
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse. 
Lest the wise world mock.' * * 

And again, 

' O, lest your tme love may seem false in this, 
That you for love speak well of me untrue. 
My name be buried where my body is. 
And live no more to shame nor me nor you. 
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth.' 

If thou hast ears to hear, O Shade of Shakspeare ! 
know that the ' wise world ' persists in a contrary 
notion. But ' the blind Old Man' whose intrepidity 
urged him beyond ' the flaming bounds of place and 
time,' knew no distrust in his reliance on succeeding 
ages. He had built for himself (and consciously,) a 
' live-long monument,' had fore-sepulchred himself in 
the reverent remembrance of those who should come 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 179 

afterwards, had graven in the EoU of the Renowned 

the name of ' Milton/ in characters which the failure 

of intelligence might obscure, but which the flight 

of Time could not efface. And so — (I speak of him 

as moved by ' fond hopes of glory/) — upheld by the 

conviction that he had left to posterity a fame which 

they ' would not willingly let die,' he could move 

on serenely towards death, with the placid dignity 

of a mighty man whom the Past had instructed and 

the Future stimulated to regard contemporaneous 

approbation as subsidiary. For him, 

' Enough, if something from his hand had power 
To live, and act, and serve ihe future hour;'* 

and a guarantee for the lastingness of his fame he 
might have found in the theme which he had chosen j 
for man's interest in it was ' infused at the creation 
of the kind,' and for ever will it closely ' come home 
to men's business and bosoms;' — long as a sentient 
being (conversant with the Poet's language) resides 
in this lower world, to mourn his alienation from a 
better, so long will that sublime story be reverently 
perused, which treats 

' Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
Of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world and all our woe. 
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat' 
* Wordsworth. 



180 CHAPTER VI. 

" The Poet's theme involves our grandest interests, 
and his illustration of it caught inspiration from its 
grandeur. As he conceived and prosecuted its ' argu- 
ment,' a matter of universal concern was removed so 
far beyond the sphere in which human reason and 
imagination are wont to dilate, that had it not been 
sustained by a gigantic intellect it would have pro- 
voked reproach; — he explored regions so distant in 
their character from this ' dim spot which men call 
Earth,' — assumed a cognizance of beings between 
whom and us so great a gulf is fixed, that had his 
design been undevout, he might have been censured 
for temerity. To ' vindicate' the Infinite to the finite 
is the high office of His ambassadors, effected by the 
simplicity of His word; but here we witness the 
Deity vindicated to the child of dust, by a basement 
and partial outwork of truth, built upon and filled in 
by a fancy which, though fallen and fallible, was 
abashed to no arrestive degree by the consciousness 
of frailty — confined mthin no boundary of being ; — 
free in volitation as though disembodied; wiser than 
Uriel, nigh to God — than Satan, chief in hell; — with 
buoyancy to soar to sublimest heights, with gravamen 
to descend to profoundest depths, with elasticity to 
expand over all space; — above, in awful proximity 
with the Presence in whose radiance the angels veil 
—beneath, in dread vicinity with the Arch-fiend at 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 181 

whose voice ' the hollow deep of hell resounds:' — 
these are associations that enter into Milton's jus- 
tification of God, — a justification ' justified only by 
success.'*" 

C. — " Numerous are the opinions that take pos- 
session of our minds without a substantial title, and 
(probably from getting into company with our pre- 
judices,) become exceedingly difficult to dislodge. 
One of such has accustomed me to attribute to the 
blindness of Milton more than his commentators have 
attributed, of the sublimity and profundity of the 
Paradise Lost. Next to the extinction of ' the heaven- 
lighted lamp' of reason, the saddest sensual depriva- 
tion known to man is generally esteemed to be the 
loss of sight: the absence of no other sense appeals so 
movingly to our common sympathy ; there is no pathos 
like the plea of the blind. But if we estimate the 
mind as our chief endowment, and esteem its culture 
as our chief concern, we shall perceive how different 
are the degrees of misfortune dependent on the period 
at which the faculties of the mind's principal agent are 
suspended. The eloqiient lamentations of Milton in 
his ' irrecoverable darkness,' both in his Great Poem 
and in Samson, dissolve the heart by their intense 
and pervading plaintiveness : in his sonnet to Cyriac 
Skinner the spirit of complaint retires before the 
* Dr. Johnson. 



182 CHAPTER VI. 

spirit of resigned submission to ' Heaven's hand and 
will/ and takes even a tone of triumph, from self- 
approving (and somewhat 'stern) exaltedness of zeal'* 
in ' Liberty's defence.' But the visual viaduct to 
Milton's mighty mind was not obstructed until vast 
resources had been conveyed by that channel to a 
most capacious reservoir. The veil fell upon his eye 
at a period when sight, as an auxiliary to the mind, 
had performed, and well performed, its function; — 
Wisdom was not ' shut out ' at that main entrance, 
till after long and laborious aggrandisement had so 
profusely stored the intellectual treasury with mul- 
tifarious gems, that there needed a respite from ac- 
cumulation. When, therefore, night came, it afforded 
a season for the assortment, disposition, and develop- 
ment of the treasures that had been amassed by the 
industry of the day. JVhat augmentation of grandeur 
the Poet's conceptions acquired by the mental ab- 
stractedness resulting from his blindness — to what 
particular degree the pinions of his fancy were in- 
vigorated by his ocular privation — may excite con- 
jecture, to no very satisfactory ascertainment: yet, 
that his imagination received anew energy to its eagle 
wing — derived a portion of the vigor of its towering 
flight and impetus of its descent, from very inability 
to expend its strength in a visible and comparatively 
* Prisoner of Chillon. B3 ron. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 183 

circumscribed sphere, I am disposed to be largely 
credulous." 

E. — " Political and religious feuds had lamentably 
distorted and inflamed the judgment of those who 
"were contemporaries with the Poet; and where the 
practice on all hands was crimination and retort, the 
Charity which ' endureth all things' could point ap- 
provingly to few. In all communities there are, it is 
to be feared, a numerous class of persons exceedingly 
keen in discerning the judicial dispensations of Pro- 
vidence, as they affect their feUow-creatures, and 
in construing the divine intention in the infliction of 
each calamity or apparent evil. — I have heard the 
soi-disant humble, the self-satisfied pure in heart, 
most odious oracles in coupling with a particular 
sin, an especial affliction. Not to wander more from 
the Poet, however, and in reference to your remarks 
concerning the beneficial effect of his blindness upon 
the character of his conceptions, I remember a noble 
burst of his indignation at an insinuation made by his 
enemies, that his great deprivation was a mark of the 
divine displeasure. ' If the choice were necessary,' 
he declares, ' I would prefer my blindness to yours : 
yours is a cloud spread over the mind, which darkens 
both the light of reason and of conscience ; mine keeps 
from my view only the coloured surfaces of things, 
while it leaves me at liberty to contemplate the beauty 



184 CHAPTER VI. 

and stability of virtue and of truth. There is, as the 
Apostle has remarked, a way to strength through 
weakness. Let me then be the most feeble creature 
alive, as long as that feebleness serves to invigorate the 
energies of my rational and immortal spirit; as long as 
in that obscurity in which I am enveloped, the light 
of the divine presence more clearly shines!'* The 
Poet appears in this to favor the supposition, that the 
loss of sight was not detrimental to the faculties of 
his mind." 

C. — " Beneficial, rather than detrimental; and 
greatly beneficial. The man of might was alone with 
himself and with exalted thoughts : his was a lofty 
imagination which, by a cause of profound sorrow, 
was placed in fortunate isolation. I am surprised 
that Dr. Johnson should have appropriated so incon- 
siderable an amount oi probable effect to a circumstance 
almost compelling the exploration of the fancy and 
inciting to more adventurous enterprises a mind so 
ill at ease in inactivity as was Milton's. Campbell, 
too, alludes to his blindness, in no tone of confident 
belief that ^ darkness aided intellectual thought:' — 
speaking of the ^ congenial impressions' made on Mil- 
ton in Italy by the frescos of Angelo and the pictures 
of Raphael, he says they may ^ possibly have been 
recalled in the formation of Milton's great poem, 
* Second Defence for the People of England. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 185 

when his eyes were shut upon the world, and when 
he looked inwardly for 'godlike shapes and forms." 
But Sir Egerton Brydges is bolder, and asserts, that 
' his outward blindness did but strengthen his inward 
light. Perhaps (he adds) but for this blindness his 
creative faculties had not been sufficiently concen- 
trated to produce his great poem. He was now shut 
out from worldly distractions, and the day was as the 
covering calm of night to him.' " 

E. — " The calm of night, indeed, but not that 
night whose fetters bind down our bodies in salutary 
and soothing restraint, till ' Morn's rosy hand unbars 
the gates of light,' and we go forth athirst again for 
the elixir which Nature divinely and diffusely pours, 
like a rich baptismal unction on the early brow of 
Day. Alas! fruitless to Mm the upland walk for 
' unimpeded commerce with the sun,' as 

' Morn, her rosy steps in th' eastern clime 
Advancing, sow'd the earth with orient pearl;' 

before him Night sat for ever on her ebon throne — he 
kindled no more at the rapture of the reawakening 
world ; to Mm all uninfectious now ' the cheerful ways 
of men,' the wild mirth of children, the glad face of 
Nature, the regal sun and radiated cloud, — " 

C. — " Pardon me for thinking that you breathe a 
rather ' browner horror ' over the scene than belongs 



186 CHAPTER VI. 

to it reasonably. You forget the willingness of Ms 
submission to a ' feebleness' that did not militate with 
mental vigor, and his own testimony that, so far from 
paralyzing or prostrating the energies of his mind, it 
caused an influx of diviner light. The alone loss 
of sight (deranging no intellectual faculty or function) 
would in any case revive Memory, and, in Milton's, 
if it did not lend sportive vivacity to Fancy, it urged 
it into the illimitable, and undoubtedly aided his con- 
ceptiveness of the incorporeal." 

E. — "^ Ay, but vivid as were Memory and Fancy, 
the very vividness with which they reminded him of 
what once had been rapture, must have made still 
sadder the remembrance of ' a glory that had passed 
away' from him, in this life, for ever. Although in 
reference to his blindness he may occasionally 

' have writ the style of gods, 
And made a pish at sufferance,' 

I have no doubt his really-acquiescent mood was 
transitory, and soon disturbed by the irksomeness of 
that enduring eclipse which veiled from him 

' the silent looks of happy things.' 

The sorrowing sympathy we feel for Milton in his 
affliction, is a far profounder feeling than that spon- 
taneous pity which ever stirs in presence of the blind ; 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 187 

of him above all men it may be emphatically said, that 
his heart knew its own bitterness in privation, as, in the 
bodying forth of his sublime imaginings, no stranger 
might intermeddle with its joy. In my opinion 
you touch his ^ ark of grief too presumptuously. 
There was little in Milton — in awful and magnificent 
Milton — that was held in common with others ; there 
might be a sameness of material elements, there was 
evidently the same liability to ' all adversities which 
happen to the body;' but as it regards men, he 'stood 

' Among them but not of them, in a shroud 
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.'* 

Your especial idol has said of this remoteness from 
the crowd, 

' Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart ;'t 
and it is this intellectual isolation that excites, in me, 
a disposition towards intense regretfulness before the 
imaginary spectacle of the blind Poet. For, to thou- 
sands in similar exclusion from the visible world, the 
' drop serene' which shuts out light, only enthrones 
lethargy ', their hearts have ability to make an ' humble 
heaven' with very scant appliances; their eye, even 
in the day of its power, might have been an ' idle orb,' 
as far as (like a spy, subserving the mind) it recon- 
noitred the visible in order to strengthen and fortify 

* Byron. f Wordsworth. 



188 CHAPTER VI. 

the intellectual. But to the unquenched eye of Mil- 
ton, Nature's silence was eloquent — ^her language 
stirring and significant ; he ' heard a voice' where 
others could not, and saw wonders in the waste 
places ; the calm languor that to others ' idlesse might 
seem/ had, for him, ' its morality.' By thousands 
the transformations of the scene around them are 
regarded with lack-lustre eye ; — ' seeing, they see not :' 
— so that seed-time and harvest return, to them it is 
all one, whether Nature array herself in the sheen 
of spring-time, and strew their field-path with flowers, 
and inundate the sunny air with song, and coax them 
into contentment with her garden and wayside stories, 
all oi promise — daily-perfecting ^rom«"se / or whether 
she be attired in the half-mourning magnificence of 
her autumnal apparel, when promise has ripened into 
full fruition. But for him of whom we speak, these 
changes had a potent charm; and when came 

' The SAveet season that bud and bloonie forth brings,'* 

he would have it to be ' stubbornness' not to go out 
and be eye-witness of the general joy. Profound, I 
say again, and permanent must have been the plaint 
of Milton while under the enduring cloud." 

C. — " Wordsworth is no admirer of Gray; yet, 
although I reverence devoutly the opinions of the 
* Earl of Surrey. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 189 

great living Master, I cannot find an encomiastic tri- 
bute to Milton worthy to be compared with the brief 
allusion to the Poet and his loss of sight, left us by 
that * consummate master of poetic diction :' — 

' Nor second he, that rode sublime 

Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy, 

The secrets of the abyss to spy; 

He pass'd the flaming bounds of place and time: — 

The living throne, the sapphire blaze, 

Where angels tiemble while they gaze, 

He saw, but blasted with excess of light, 

Closed his eyes in endless night.' " 

£J. — " There is something Miltonic in that noble 
motet — pity that so grand a swell should so soon die 
away! But as it relates to the hero — the Eider on 
seraph-wings, is it not a moving piece of mental 
imagery, capable of metamorphoses stranger in their 
reality than are many of the wonders of romance, that 
blind Old Man seated in modest apparel beside his 
lowly portal, in all the pitiable impotency of his 
infirmity ; ' on evil days fallen, with dangers com- 
passed, in darkness and solitude;' and then, (marvel- 
lous contrast between corporeal imbecility and mental 
puissance !) to view him as withdrawn from contact 
with the strife of ' evil tongues,' as having entered 
into synods of gods, and with intellect augmented by 
archangelic intercourse, reporting 

' things invisible to mortal sight:' — 



190 CHAPTER VI. 

nor uninteresting is it to reflect^ by what casual 
instrumentality were recorded 

' The visions which arose without a sleep.'* 

I humbly think, however, (an error, perhaps, of ' the 
voluntary taste of common intellect,'!) that the current 
of his august conceptions is sometimes prejudicially 
diverted by extraneous supplies; — the main fluxion 
is too much troubled by the tributary streams that at 
frequent intervals come pouring into it from the 

Pierian springs, 

* which rush. 
No rill, but rather an o'erflowing flood.'t 

Turning, as we have done, from Shakspeare to Mil- 
ton, — from effusions, literally effusions of simplicity, 
to a production distinguished for scholarship, — the 
transition is unfavorable (in my poor estimation) to 
Milton, as it regards general effectiveness. There 
is so magnetic a charm in the naivete of Nature's Peti 
Did they both stand in breathing statuary, a natural 
impulse would render before Milton the homage of a 
reverent genuflexion; but, loving more and worship- 
ping not less, we would approach that other Oracle, 
as a Champion who had ' done the state some service' 
might advance to the salutation of a smiling Queen. 

* Lament of Tasso. Byron. t Sir E. Brydges. 

X Cowper's Tiaiislation of Milton's Latin Poem to his Father. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 191 

I tliinlc I have previously mentioned to you a vene- 
rable friend, who, with a love of poetry of which Age 
has not chilled the ardency, is, strangely, little ' moved 
by concord of sweet sounds,' and trusts, (in his own 
quaint expression,) ' to find that heaven is something 
better than a large orchestra.' His appreciation of 
* glorious, untutored Will, and mighty, scholastic 
John,' is genuinely British. — ' That ostentatious dis- 
play of scholarship — that seizing upon every occasion 
to let the world know how well he was acquainted 
with all the realms of Art and Science, of classic and 
romantic lore, which is continually visible in Milton — 
is not at all to my taste (says he) ; but Willie's ' sweet 
neglect ' of artistical embellishment — the ease with 
which his pen transfixes ideal images of grace and 
beauty, without casting carefully about for ' florid 
prose or honied rhyme,' and yet so frequently ex- 
quisite where seemingly unstudied — are features that 
when the eye looks upon, it hves.^ He who thus 
opineth was with me a few days since : he is a logician, 
and has a habit of demanding 'proofs upon assertion, 
which makes it advisable, before introducing to him 
an hypothesis, to ascertain that it has legs to stand on. 
During a cursory discussion upon Milton, I meekly 
ventured to hint how fair a field might Moore have 
found in Paradise, prior to our Ancestors' ejectment: 
the pen that reported the Loves of the Angels, would 



192 CHAPTER VI. 

not its current have chrystalized, and flowed in rain- 
bow-liues, as it told of the Garden, when, as with the 
yet-lingering pressure of the Creator's hand, it was 
pronounced ' good,' and was blissful as are all things 
which are born of God. 'Twas an evening lovely as 
that we just now witnessed, when my ancient ally was 
with me ; and the beautiful time so forcibly suggested 
the primeval vesper-hour, ere Danger frowned through 
the darkness to agitate Dread, and when, by gentle 
graduation brooded over by the silver- winged Silence, 
the young world sunk, in the languor of long hap- 
piness to rest, in order to recruit its capacity of 
enjoyment for the repletion of the morrow; — in all 
the grandeur of its serenity, the time, I say, so much 
impressed me, that when my companion left (unused, 
albeit, to 'spend my prodigal wits in bootless rhymes*), 
I could not abstain from lamely chasing the idea of 



* Love's Labour liOst, v. ?. 






'PO tranquillize th' ecstatic Hours, 
A soothing iimber-sliade was given, 
Whicli Day eterne liath not in Heaven; 
Nor lent to Earth, unless that powers 
Not infinite might wearied be 
By o'er-prolonged felicity. 
But who may paint, what accents tell, 
The infant Sun's sublime farewell? 
The splendor of day were palor now 
To the fulgeucy of his fiei-y brow. 
As, like a god with glory drest. 
Whose robe illumed his couch of rest, 
He sunk within the crimson'd West. 

And now, the ruddy day-beams fleetly failing. 
Night falls on Eden like a spirit's wing; 

Fresh fragrance all th' odorous bow'rs exhaling. 
Inspiring which their quires forget to sing: 
z2 



194 NIGHT IN EDEN. 

The shadow spreads, like vast narcotic shield, 
And flowers breathe, in downy slumber sealed ; — 
Fair children all, yet one supremely sweet, 

With whom, on wakening from its first repose. 
An am'rous sunbeam, raptured, chanced to meet. 
And kissed the blushing flow'ret to a rose. 
And streamlets rilled a softer tune 
As o'er their ripples shed the Moon 
A paler, scarce less lucid ray, 
Than that which burnished them by day; — 
And while each bliss-o'erburdened sense 
Reclined in quietude intense. 
There echoed from the etherial clime. 
Strains such as when, in quires sublime, 
To radiant harps, the gushing hymn 
Bursts from the bright-eyed cherubim ; 
While near at hand, and from afar. 
Streamed melody from many a star: — 
O ! had those stars been Luna's daughters. 
They might have paused in their career. 
Perchance have left their stellar sphere. 
To linger over Eden's waters ; 
For mirror'd shone each pearly gem 
That glistened in Night's diadem, — 
Each lovely in its lustrous throne, the sky. 

As Vestal fair to Beauty's crown aspiring, 
Seen by the light of her own jetty eye, 

Ere dimmed by tears — or too devout admiring. 



NIGHT IN EDEN. 195 

Night reigned : soft Zephyrs that by day 
Did now in sportive dalliance stray 
Where'er a new perfume had birth, 
Would then in fragrance flee away 
To tempt the mighty Sea to play. 
Th' exulting Main, in giant mirth. 
And joyous unison with Earth, 
Toss'd high, in ecstasy, his spray. 
But Rapture lulled itself to rest 
When Phcebus Paradise had blest. 
And Eden donned her night array, — 
Then hush'd grew Ocean, placid Sleep 
In star-lit slumber stilled the Deep. 

'Twas an exquisite hour, that reign of Night, 

So blissful and dreamy in its delight 

That Earth might have longed for none other light; 

Yet silence seemed a state forlorn 

When, from the roseate East, the Morn 

Rous'd, and redeck'd, that vernal scene 

To vivid joy, in sparkling sheen; 

And Eden wore so glad a smile, 

It might e'en seraphim beguile. 



V_^^4^^-^ 



196 



CHAPTER VI. 



C. — " The notion of tlie stars being daughters of 
the moon, would hardly pass unscathed by the good- 
humoured satire of your logical friend, I should think ; 
nor would you escape censure from le heau sexe, for 
the imputation of vanity conveyed under a figure (you 
vs^ill excuse my candour,) rather difficult of digestion." 

E. — " When I ' showed ' to the quaint comrade of 
my youth this ' wandering' * of my old age, he fixed 
on that identical figure for jocular criticism, remarking, 
' Your making the moon a mother of the stars suggests 
the application of a popular phrase to comets, if you 
include them in the number of Luna's children ; and 
nothing can be easier to conceive, than the virtuous 
astonishment of the better-behaved members of the 
starry family at the wild ways of their erratic sisters. 
I fancy I see the pale and prudish planets, looking 
at a comet in its disorderly courses, like a maid from 
the backwoods beholding the passing of a rail-train — 
half-frighted, half-amazed; and senses so rarified as 
yours are, might, I dare say, hear the cold virgins, 
as the blazing comet swept rudely by them, making 
inquiries as to the moon-mother's knowledge of its 
whereabouts.' And then I was ungratefully attacked 
by the bairn whose rearing I have superintended from 

* ' O! where have I been all this time? — how tended, 
That none, for pity, show'd nie how I wandered?' 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 197 

babyliood, (and whose quibble you curiously re-ecbo^) 
touching the offensive insiniiation of vanity aux dairies. 
But I am happy to be able to repel your accusation, 
that the figure is outre, unless you similarly impeach 
great Milton; for in his paraphrase of the hundred and 
thirty-sixth psalm, he mentions with the Creator's 

works, 

' The horned moon that shines by night, 
Among. her spangled sisters bright;' 

and when you consider how, with ' inaudible and 
noiseless step'* she moves, and watches, with more 
than a sister's patience, through the long night-hours, 
and enters (no respecter of persons, like her God !) 
through the tiniest lattice, so it be cleanly and un- 
curtained, and in sweet stealth advances till she kiss 
the face of the sleeping, leaving him bright dreams 
as her blessing; and how she passes away again, but 
lingeringiy — oh! very lingeringly, to shine on other 
slumbers, until that dazzling ' god who brings the 
Day, mounts up,' and dissipates the visionary spell — 
in its silvery structure too etherial to exist in the red, 
rapturous riot of the rousing Day : — all this assiduity 
and solicitude oi3Iadame la Ltine, Sir Censor, you will 
admit to be more maternal than sisterly; so, unless 

* ' On our quick'st decrees 
The inaudible and noiseless step of Time 
Steals, ere we can effect them. — Shakspeare, 



198 CHAPTER VI. 

your hardihood would cast a stone at John Milton, 
retract the charge of monstrosity in my describing 
the moon as a mother — of many lovely daughters." 

C. — " Mrs. Hemans would have made a glowing 
picture of the Garden, before the arch-tempter had 
wrought his work there, and ere our father trembled 
at the voice of God. The scene is better suited for 
the description of an imaginative and noble-natured 
woman, than it is for man; for although woman is, 

with him, 

♦ Fall'n, fall'n, fall'n, fall'n, 
Fall'n from her high estate,' 

the web of her life is far less mixed with ill than 
his, and our fairest ideas of terrestrial purity connect 
themselves with the stainless mind of woman. Ex- 
empted far more than man, from the knowledge of 
evil, and far more conversant with ' whatsoever things 
are pure,' her qualifications to imagine and portray 
a condition of innocency, are manifestly superior to 
those of man. In her Despondency and Aspiration, 
the highly-gifted Mrs. Hemans has poured out a 
torrent of brilliant conceptions — a guarantee of her 
power to have made a most luxuriant and living 
landscape of Eden, in the flush of its first perfection." 
E. — " When I read that Poem, I considered that, 
all golden as is its language, great must have been 
the injury inflicted on her thoughts, by subjection to 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 199 

the p7'oces-verhal necessary before the presentation of 
an Idea to the public. But — tolerate this one last 
remark — who may calculate the crippling effect of 
clothing in words the imagery of the wonderful and 
mighty mind of Milton 1 Is it debatable, think you, 
—would it be by miy one contested, that the author 
of the Paradise Lost, having no equal in the sub- 
limity of his conceptions, had ever an equal suiFerer 
from the deficiencies of language adequate to their 
incorporation and expression — though Speech to him 
was like a deep-toned shell,* struck by a prophet's 
hand; — he was omnipotent over numbers. But the 
mean mind in motion is still meaner when it records 
that motion. Language and speech may communicate 
much that stirs within; they may interpret ideas whose 
outlines are defined — conceptions which dwell within 
compass: but when the imagination hurries into the 
far depths of a starry sky, or dives into the stirless 
m^^steries of its own being, or rises in conjecture to 
the sphere of its ultimate destiny — then Thought is 
lost in the chaos of its own creations. For speech, 
potent prerogative as it is, hath no part in the subtler 
and intenser emotions which prevail, when the soul 
holdeth holy-day beyond the barriers of earth, and 
feels (heavenliest perception !) its affinity with a king- 
dom and kindred higher and holier than itself. But 
* Gray's Ode— The Death of Hoel. 



200 CHAPTER VI. 

this rare, stirring sense of royalty has no audible 
articulation, nor may the after-mind, subdued and 
sunken, translate the characters of its shadowy crea- 
tion: — all that survives the deluge of divine light 
is known but as the bodiless visions of a dream — 
as a bright and beautiful illusion, which a breath 
destroyed!" 



There are many things concerning the Elder in 
these confabulations yet undisclosed, which I would 
not willingly have to remain so— May'st thou, O gentle 
Reader ! have ' thus far held on with him untired.' 
But having now performed a ' vow,' with mine own 
self recorded, and attained a page at which I promised 
perseverance a resting-place^ I pause, to proceed by 
a pathway through the press less tedious and laborious 
than that to this point pursued. It is of pleasant 
things I have to tell — mfer alia, of the days of passion 
of that faithful, fond Old Man (though Sorrow sad- 
dened these, but with a shade sweeter to the soul 
than the sunlight of the smile of Joy) ; and why, then, 
(as the tearless survivor of a termagant helpmeet 
observed, in bidding her bearers more leisurely to 
convey her silent remains to their long home,) why 
should we make a toil of pleasure ? 



I 



FROM THE PRESS OF J. LORDAN, ROMSE 



LbF< 



J 






1 



iiiliiii^Pi^i^^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




012 608 543 6 



